Determinants of Emotional Experiences in Traffic Situations ... - OPUS

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118 Emotional States of Drivers and Their Impact on Driving Behaviour! and no frustration or anger is needed to elicit higher speeds. Drivers who value driving as an important activity seem to enjoy driving at higher speeds and taking the risks that accompany this behaviour. This is especially true for the male participants in both studies. The discussion in study one has already pointed out that males are prone to underestimate the dangers of a possible harmful situation (Laapotti & Keskinen, 2004; Hennessy & Wiesenthal, 1999) and are constantly overestimating their driving skills (Ulleberg, 2001; Yagil, 1998). This was valid in both studies. Independently from anger and driving motivation, males were driving faster, accelerating more strongly, speeding more and demonstrating more intense lateral acceleration (the last indicator only in study two). They did not show more driving motivation than female participants, which indicates the importance of other motivations, and moves the focus to subjective skill levels and risk perception processes of this group. Trait driving anger as measured with the DAS did not have any effects on observed driving behaviour. This is concordant with the findings of Stephens & Groeger (2009), who showed that situational aspects and online-appraisals of the situation such as in frustrating or angering events are far more effective for predicting driving behaviour. Therefore, it can be said that in the simulated environment of both studies, the DAS score loses some predictive validity (in contradiction to Deffenbacher et al., 2003) and more proximal measures of state anger like the GEW gain influence. Therefore, future research should employ a context specific, sensitive measure of anger like the GEW in order to validate state anger and its influence as distinct from trait anger and personal characteristics. Another interesting outcome of this research is that driving experience did not have a significant impact on driving performance. This is partly counterintuitive because novice drivers should be prone to maladaptive driving behaviour such as poor lateral control (Krahé & Fenske, 2002). But this was not the case in the two simulator studies. It is possible that the driving behaviour assessed was not sensitive to differences at those low levels of driving experience and therefore describes a range restriction effect (Hunter, Schmidt & Le, 2006). This might have been different if a focus had not been on driving speeds and accelerations but on attention processes and braking reaction times. Those driving behaviours also require a sophisticated mental model in the first place but benefit vastly from extra exposure to traffic early in the driving history of the individual (Crundall, Underwood & Chapman, 1999). The limitations of this study were threefold. First, the drive was simulated in the laboratory and the situations were artificial. Real traffic is less simplified and yields a greater variation of possible situations, leading to different emotional levels and influences on driving patterns. The traffic situations in study two were designed to overcome this problem, presenting four completely distinct situations to evoke anger. The results suggest that this general pattern of effects can be predicted in all contexts. Nevertheless, only rural / village roads were used, which is important to keep in mind if results are aggregated and generalized. A congested highway or a rush-hour city setting might reveal different patterns and new effects, which can easily disappear when averaged with other contexts.
Introducing a Multivariate Model for Predicting Driving Performance 119 The second limitation is that this study gives no explanation of why an emotion, high driving motivation or being male changes driving behaviour. Every construct has possible mediating features, such as poor risk assessment under high anger (Lerner & Keltner, 2001; Mesken et al., 2007; Richer & Bergeron, 2012), or an overestimation of subjective skill levels among male participants (DeJoy, 1992; Ulleberg, 2001). The anger-risk relationship was only derived from driving patterns in order to minimize interaction with the participants and not to make the participants consciously aware of this construct. Contrary to Mesken et al. (2007), Stephens and Groeger (2009) did not find any relationships between anger and threat evaluations within their simulator study, which makes it plausible that emotions and risk assessment are highly dependent on the given situation. The hypothesis that an overestimation of own skills and a wrong assessment of risk in a given situation is one characteristic of male participants might be supported by the fact that even controlled for anger, driving motivation and driving experience, the driving performance of men is still worse than that of women. It would be fruitful to add subjective skill level as measured in the driver skill inventory (Lajunen & Summala, 1995) to this kind of research in order to shed some light on this issue. The third limitation of this study is that the reported emotions in both experiments are very weak, which seems to be the problem of many studies within a driving simulator or even in real live traffic experiments (Hennessy & Wiesenthal, 2009; Stephens & Groeger, 2009). This could hamper important associations between emotion and behaviour. From a quality perspective, a comparison between the first study, with its unspecific anger levels, and the second study, with context specific anger, revealed a more consistent pattern of the anger to driving performance relationship in study two. But there might be an intensity threshold which lies well above the levels of anger assessed, and perhaps exceeding this threshold could lead to even more and stronger changes in driving behaviour. In conclusion, the research presented in this paper has shown that the emotion of anger, high driving motivation and being male are, independently of each other, significant predictors of risky driving such as high velocity and speeding. This could impede safe driving and therefore increase the risk of accidents in traffic. Acknowledgement This research project was supported by a grant (F.A.-Nr. 2006.63) from the ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft Innovative Projekte’ (AGIP) of the Ministry of Science and Culture, Lower Saxony, Germany. !
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Determinants of Emotional Experienc
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Acknowledgements I would like to th
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Abstract Emotions play a prominent
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2.3.2.2.5 Testing H5 ..............
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List of Tables Chapter 2: The Emoti
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Introduction 11 1. Introduction 1.1
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Introduction 13 (Deffenbacher et al
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Introduction 15 emotions varies vas
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Introduction 17 Therefore, a precis
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Introduction 19 On the behavioural
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Introduction 21 A coherent model of
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Introduction 23 Chliaoutakis, J.E.,
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Introduction 25 Giegling, I., Hartm
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Introduction 27 Reason, J., Manstea
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Introduction 29 Ulleberg, P., (2001
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The Emotional Spectrum in Traffic S
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49 The Emotional Spectrum in Traffi
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