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

The Emotional Spectrum in Traffic Situation 68!
SD = 0.70), but the profile of situational attributes (e.g. more intensely experienced anger due to
another driver blocking the arrival goal of the participant) are very similar, which underlines the
importance of and the potential for describing traffic situations with the selected factors goal
congruence, goal relevance and blame.
Additionally, due to the relatively young and inexperienced sample in both studies, future
research should focus on representative samples taking more age groups and experienced drivers into
account. Their inclusion could lead to even more precise results and researchers would have to deal a
lot less with the often confounding variables of gender, driving experience and age.
Finally, the high similarity between the emotion-situation pattern in both studies might be a
result of our selection of emotions from the GEW. Emotions which were not predictive (e.g. disgust,
envy) were eliminated and replaced by more suitable emotions (e.g. feeling helpless, happiness). This
might have hampered the comparability of how participants selected emotions, and thus exaggerate
estimates of similarity between both studies. On the other hand, having a larger set of highly traffic
relevant emotions in study 2 automatically reduces the likelihood that any one of them will be chosen,
especially when participants are only allowed to pick the three most suitable emotions from the wheel.
In addition to this possible limitation, the GEW needs more validation especially in the traffic context.
Therefore, future studies should employ the emotion wheel together with other measurements of
emotion (e.g. physiological methods). However, in order to use this instrument in real traffic, a
different form of presentation is necessary (e.g. read aloud context-specific emotions and receive
verbal response).
Conclusion
The results of both studies described in this paper imply that an understanding of situational
characteristics of traffic events such as goal congruence, goal relevance and blame leads to a more
precise description of the nature of emotion elicitation. The results indicate that a greater variety of
emotions besides anger and anxiety can be experienced in everyday traffic. The implications for
driving behaviour are not as yet clear, and much more research is needed to fully understand the
relationship between a traffic situation, personal characteristics, emotional experiences and actual
driving behaviour. For a start, future models of emotions and driving behaviour should take the
richness of emotions in traffic into account in order to improve their precision and validity.
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.