Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 130, October 2020, 104857
Safety Science

The influence of emotional state on risk perception in pedestrians: A psychophysiological approach

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104857Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The study aimed to explore the effect of happiness and sadness on risk perception.

  • Both happiness and sadness groups perceived less risk than the controls group.

  • The control group showed the highest activation in high and low risky situations.

  • The control group were the best discriminating between high and low risk situations.

  • There were no differences by group in the subjective way of risk perception.

Abstract

Traffic accidents involving pedestrians represent one of the most relevant causes of death and injury around the world. Several studies have underlined the role of risk perception as a clear predictor of risky behaviour in pedestrians. However, risk perception is an ability susceptible to be altered as a consequence of some circumstances and psychological issues, such as emotional states. The present research aimed to study the influence of two emotions (happiness and sadness) on risk perception in pedestrians. To carry said research out, 53 participants took part in the experiment. They had previously been randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions (happiness group, sadness group and control group), by watching a video clip to generate the implied emotion. After this, all of them watched a sequence of 8 video clips involving pedestrian situations, four of which involved a risky situation while the other four involved a non-risky situation. Risk perception was measured by both self-report and psychophysiological arousal. The results showed that the control group got significantly more physiological activation in high risky situations than the other two groups, both in Skin Conductance Level and Skin Conductance Response. Besides, the control group was the only one who got a significant higher activation in high risk situations than in no risky situations, both in SCL and in SCR. These results suggest that pedestrians walking under a relevant emotional state could have their risk perception ability negatively affected, with potential consequences on suffering road accidents.

Introduction

Traffic accidents involving pedestrians represent an important cause of death and severe injuries in Spain. According to official statistics, during 2017 there were 351 pedestrians killed (19% of the total of people killed in traffic accidents), 1940 were injured and required hospitalization, and 12,382 were injured and did not require hospitalization (DGT, 2018). Despite the general tendency to reduce the number of pedestrian deaths throughout recent years, research is still needed to improve knowledge of the variables predicting traffic accidents involving pedestrians.

Road safety studies have identified three categories of variables which are involved in any traffic situation: infrastructures (conditions of pavement, road, etc.), vehicles (technical issues related to cars, trucks, bicycles, etc.) and human factors (involving all of the physical and psychological aspects of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians). Of these, the human factor has arisen as the main predictor of road accidents (Karpova et al., 2017, Plotnikova, 2018, Sikron et al., 2008). It is, then, necessary to explore the main variables in the human factor which could explain the occurrence of traffic accidents.

Research in Traffic Psychology has highlighted risky behaviours in both drivers (Elander et al., 1993, Herrero-Fernández and Fonseca-Baeza, 2017, Herrero-Fernández et al., 2019a, Wang and Xu, 2019) and pedestrians (Granié, 2009, Granié et al., 2013, Zhou et al., 2009) as one of the best predictors of traffic accidents. At the same time, risky behaviour has been proposed as a direct result of risk perception, so the greater the risk perceived in one specific situation, the less likelihood of conducting a risky behaviour is (Castanier et al., 2012, Elias and Shiftan, 2012, Herrero-Fernández, 2015, Herrero-Fernández et al., 2016, Wilde, 1982, Wilde, 1988). Moreover, literature has pointed out a negative correlation between age and risky behaviours on the road, i.e., younger pedestrians would perceive less risk, therefore, taking more risks, and having a higher probability of being run over in an accident than older pedestrians (Alonso et al., 2018, Brosseau et al., 2013, Lichenstein et al., 2012, Ojo et al., 2019). More specifically, young adult pedestrians (aged 18–35) have been identified as the highest risk group, as they are associated, more strongly than other age groups, with both dangerous crossing and dangerous violations (Brosseau et al., 2013).

Risk perception, as defined in the information processing theory (Kahneman and Frederick, 2002), is processed in two separate ways: risk as analysis and risk as affect or feeling. The differences found between subjective (self-reported) and objective (physiological arousal) risk perception support the idea that physiological arousal could reflect automatic processes of risk assessment (Crundall et al., 2003, Kinnear et al., 2008), which could be unrelated to the conscious analysis of risk (Slovic et al., 2002, Slovic et al., 2004). Therefore, these two ways should be assessed in risk perception research, as they are proposed as an orthogonal model.

Self-report methods to assess risk perception have been measured in previous research through Likert scales (Groot et al., 2013, Kuttschreuter and Hilverda, 2019, Ma et al., 2019), visual-analogic scales (Gallo et al., 2014) and qualitative interviews (Khan and Chreim, 2019). Regarding the objective measurement of risk perception, physiological correlates of risk perception have been well-established. Research in different areas including pedestrians (Herrero-Fernández et al., 2016) has shown that electrodermal activity (EDA) covariates with risk perception (Choi et al., 2019, Kinnear et al., 2013, Wickramasekera et al., 1996). Moreover, studies on the distinguishing features of emotions have shown that fear, an emotion associated with perceived risk, has a specific and unique pattern of EDA that is different to other emotions like anger or dislike (Williams et al., 2005). This could be due to the biological characteristics of EDA, which is a direct measure of sympathetic nervous system, as sweat glands are innervated only by the sympathetic nervous system. Given that the parasympathetic nervous system does not affect it, the balance between them (activation system vs. calm down system) is not considered, and, therefore, very short stimulus – response time lapses are observed. Besides, EDA is commonly measured through both tonic and phasic activity. Whereas the first one refers to a general level of activation, the second one does so to a certain increase in respect to the level.

Otherwise, more commonly used physiological indices [e.g. respiration rate (RR), heart rate (HR)] have shown smaller relationships with risk perception, which could be due to the dual innervation of both cardiovascular and respiratory systems (sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems). Only one study on drivers found that self-reported perceived risk correlated with HR (Mesken et al., 2007).

On the other hand, risk perception could be influenced by some psychological variables, such as emotions (Waters, 2008). Research has focused mainly on the study of personality traits, especially anger, establishing strong correlations between this personality trait and risky behaviours in both drivers (Deffenbacher, 2008, Escanes and Poo, 2018, Ferrer et al., 2017, Peng et al., 2019) and pedestrians (Herrero-Fernández et al., 2019b). However, less attention has been paid to other emotions like sadness (Jeon, 2016, Jeon and Zhang, 2013) or happiness (Nisa'Minhad et al., 2016) in spite of their negative influence on the quality of driving. Even less amount of research has been dedicated to analyzing emotional states. Previous studies have shown that negative and even positive emotional states (Hogarth et al., 2007) could affect risk perception negatively (Bhandari et al., 2016b, Liu et al., 2013, Rajesh et al., 2017), with the subsequent increase in risky behaviours.

The aim of the current study is, then, to analyze how emotional states affect risk perception in young pedestrians. More specifically, two opposite emotional states (happiness and sadness) will be compared with a control condition (neutral emotion) in their influence on risk perception in both high and low risky situations. The hypothesis of the research is that both positive (happiness) and negative (sadness) emotions will similarly reduce the risk perception ability, in comparison with the control condition.

Section snippets

Participants

Seventy participants (Psychology ungraduate students) were recruited and randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions. All of them were Spanish. After watching the video (in both happiness and sadness groups) or waiting (in the control group), those participants who reported feeling the emotion corresponding to the assigned group (happiness in the happiness group, sadness in the sadness group, and “neutral emotion” in the control group) were selected to take part in the study,

Preliminary analyses

First, the effect of the independent variable (videos in the case of both experimental groups and waiting time with no stimulus in the control group) on the induction of emotion was analyzed through a χ2-test, so the association between the assigned experimental condition (sadness, happiness, or control) and the reported emotion (sadness, happiness, surprise, disgust, anger, fear, other emotion, or neutral emotion) was tested. The results showed a significant effect with a large effect size (

Discussion

The goal of the current research was to analyse the influence of two opposite emotional states (happiness and sadness) on the ability of risk perception in a pedestrian context. With this aim in mind, an experimental task was designed to induce the emotional state and to measure the risk perception in two ways (Kahneman and Frederick, 2002), both objectively (psychophysiological arousal) and subjectively (self-report).

First of all, the preliminary analyses show that the effectiveness of emotion

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