Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

glucocorticoids is under the control of what is called the Hypothalamic-
Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis can be activated by a wide
variety of stressors. An important role of the HPA response to stressors is to
restore the physiological balance to prevent overreaction of defence
mechanisms to stress. How the HPA axis functions depends to a large extend
on sex hormones (testosterone and oestrogen). There are marked differences
in the production of sex hormones between boys and girls from puberty on.
This could be the cause that in females there is an increased response of the
HPA axis to stress with advancing age after the onset of puberty, while in
males the response is decreased, possibly associated with increased
testosterone levels (McCormick & Mathews, 2007).
Considering the mentioned structural and functional differences between
women and men that start to emerge at the onset of adolescence and
continue to develop well into the third decade in life, both young male
drivers and young female drivers probably take more risks in traffic than
middle-aged drivers due to brain development. As the brains of young
female drivers mature faster than the brains of young male drivers, this
tendency to take risks is stronger in young males than in young females.
2.3.3. Personality
Most young drivers will not experience a severe crash in the first years of
their driving carrier. In the Netherlands in 2008 less than one per thousand of
the licence holders (for a car) aged 18-24 was involved in a severe crash
(crashes that result in at least one fatality or one person so seriously injured
that hospitalization is required), source: Ministry of Infrastructure and
Environment / Statistics Netherlands. Could it be that young drivers with
certain personality traits are more risky drivers than young drivers with
other personality traits? Ulleberg (2001) found that there were two groups of
young drivers (aged 18-23) that reported risky driving behaviour. The first
high-risk group consisted mostly of young men who had low levels of
altruism and anxiety and high levels of sensation seeking and
irresponsibility. These young drivers showed risky behaviour not so much,
because they were angry with other road users but because dangerous
driving was considered thrilling and because they did not care so much
about the wellbeing of others. The second high-risk group also scored high
on sensation seeking, but in contrast to the first group, this group had high
scores on aggression, anxiety and driving anger. These young drivers
seemed to tolerate little from other road users and got angry easily. What
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