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

The Emotional Spectrum in Traffic Situation 52!
one goal promoting) and two contexts of task demand (high / low time pressure and traffic density). In
this second study, more than 50 new situations were developed, involving a great variety of settings
and contexts. Due to the two additional variations in the blame-factor a 4x2x2 design seemed
appropriate so that 16 traffic situations were selected and categorized by the same traffic psychologists
from the first study (an extract of this selection is shown in table 7). The factor blame was now
differentiated between circumstances to blame, other-blame and self-blame. The latter was split up
into “Participants’ actions have an effect on the outcome for other drivers” and “Participants’ actions
have an effect on the outcome for themselves” (4x). Goal relevance was again defined based on either
arrival or safety related goals (2x). Goal congruence ranged from having goal promoting to goal
blocking characteristics within the scenario (2x).
All emotions were demonstrated using a revised edition of the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW;
Scherer, 2005). The number of emotions remained constant but some of them were exchanged for
more relevant ones. The emotional facets disgust, elation and envy were removed completely because
they could not be found in any traffic situations in the first study. Pleasure was merged with
satisfaction because of the rather high similarity between both concepts. To fill the resulting gaps a
survey of 33 undergraduate students was conducted in order to identify more possible emotions which
could occur in traffic situations (Oehl, Roidl, Frehse, Suhr, Siebert et al., 2010). The participants had
to recall traffic situations which they had experienced in the last six months and describe which
emotions they had felt in each situation. This led to the addition of amusement, happiness, fright and
feeling helpless to the emotional spectrum.
The intrapersonal attributes influencing reported emotions were again gender, annual mileage
and driving motivation. The latter played the same role as in study one, to assess the importance of as
well as pleasure from driving. Predispositions towards certain emotions were assessed again with the
German version of the DAS (Driving Anger Scale, Deffenbacher et al., 1994; Steffgen, Recchia &
Ludewig, 2008) and German version of the STAI (State Trait Anxiety Scale; Spielberger, 1983; Laux,
Glanzmann, Schaffner & Spielberger, 1981). The experimental procedure of the first study – applying
the LimeSurvey platform and acquiring participants via the university newsletter and social networks
– was also used for the second study. A control question was used in order to prevent persons who had
taken part in the first study from participating a second time.