Negative or positive? The effect of emotion and mood on risky driving

Abstract

This research explored how two states of affect, emotion and mood, would influence driver’s risky driving behavior through risk perception and risk attitude. An experiment and a survey were adopted to test the two paths. In this model, negative affect played an opposite and more powerful role compared to positive affect. Study 1 was an experimental study with four treatment groups. Participants watched one of four video clips (traffic-related negative, traffic-unrelated negative, positive and neutral) and different emotions were induced. Negative emotion significantly elevated drivers’ risk perception but such perception failed to develop an appropriate attitude for drivers. A more favorable risk attitude resulted in increased reports of speeding. Turning from a “point” effect to a similar “period” effect, a survey was carried out in Study 2 to explore the effect of positive and negative mood instead of emotion. Mood states affected drivers’ risky driving behavior through risk perception as well as risk attitude, which was in line with the results of Study 1. The “bad is stronger than good” effect and the two paths in the model were discussed.

Introduction

With the growth of motor vehicle use in China, the amount of casualty and property loss is ever increasing. According to the annual statistical report of road traffic accidents in China, the number of traffic accidents, fatality, and injury have been declined since 2002–2011, with the number of recorded accidents reduced from 773.1 thousand in 2002 to 210.8 thousand in 2011, the number of fatality decreased from 109.4 thousand to 62.4 thousand. However, as the data revealed, the number of fatality and injury per accident was increasing. The traffic accident is still one of the main causes of people’s deaths or disabilities (Bureau of Traffic Management PRC, 2007, Bureau of Traffic Management PRC, 2011). World Health Organization (2011) reported that traffic accident was one of the top 10 causes of death in middle-income countries in 2008. The traffic safety has also becoming a global issue of common concern. Hence, great concern and effort need to be put on road safety in China.

Among many factors that cause traffic accidents, human factor plays a more important role beyond other factors such as vehicle, road, etc. (Rumar, 1990, United States General Accounting Office, 2003, Wang, 1995). As a critical part of human being, emotion cannot be ignored when we are trying to reveal the nature of risky driving. Most work in this area was oriented towards road rage or aggressive driving in which emotion and behavior were intertwined (e.g., Dula and Ballard, 2003, Dula and Geller, 2003). An important work done by Mesken, Hagenzieker, Rothengatter, and de Waard (2007) revealed that specific emotions (i.e. anger, anxiety, and happiness) had different correlations to road events and speeding. However, there were some results in this study showing a closer relationship between the two negative emotions (Mesken et al., 2007). This was possible because the emotion or feeling people experience in daily life was usually complicated and mixed rather than specific. Embodied in a hurry city life, people could bring emotions, of any kind, and of any source, on road. There are often times (e.g., driving attentively in a busy traffic) when a person could hardly tell what the exact emotion he or she is experiencing instead of generally describing his or her feeling as “good” or “bad”. There are also times when a person was emotionally aroused by something unrelated to driving situation before or during driving. As a result, in spite of the value for distinguishing the effects of every specific emotion, it is reasonable to examine the comprehensive effect of non-specific positive and negative emotions from a “valence-based” perspective (Barrett, 1998, Elster, 1998, Kuvaas and Kaufmann, 2004). Moreover, we focused mainly on the effect of incidental affect (Cohen, Pham, & Andrade, 2007), the source of which was not necessarily connected with driving risk or driving situations.

According to the cognitive theory of emotion, the attributes of emotions, “positive” and “negative”, were in nature the appraisals we make on the events we encounter (Arnold, 1968). Such appraisals could be simply labeled as “good” or “bad”. In other words, a positive emotion means an emotion that is (appraised as) pleasant, healthy, and carry positive attitude to self and others, and negative emotion vice versa (Robert & Lori, 2002). This categorization of emotion was confirmed in scale developing (Ostir, Smith, Smith, & Ottenbacher, 2005) as well as in some experimental studies (e.g. Ladhari et al., 2008, Langer and Keltner, 2008).

One of the mainstreams of the previous traffic research focused on two cognitive antecedents of risky driving, which were driving risk perception and risky driving attitude. Risk perception was originally used to describe people’s subjective perception of a potential danger. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis proposed by Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, and Welch (2001) argued that the feelings originated from the cognitive evaluation process would influence reciprocally on the current judgment. Through similar lines of thought, many researchers employed both a cognitive component and an affective component on risk perception. The former component represents judgment about the subjective probability of potential danger, while the latter one represents concern about oneself as a victim of the danger (Baron et al., 2000, Fischhoff et al., 2004). In the transportation field, traffic risk perception was found to vary across different groups of people (Nordfjærn and Rundmo, 2009, Oltedal and Rundmo, 2007, Şimşekoğlu et al., 2012). Some researchers believe that the subjective perception of traffic risk has an important effect on driving safety (Gregersen, 1996). Rundmo and Iversen (2004) found that a higher emotional-based perception of traffic hazard was related to a safer self-report driving behavior.

Defined as a psychological tendency to evaluate something with favor or disfavor, attitude is formed on the basis of cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Attitude toward risk-taking in driving is the favorable/unfavorable evaluation or the receptivity of risky driving behavior. Researchers found that attitude toward risky driving could be changed through some kinds of interventions (Falk & Montgomery, 2009). According to the theory of planned behavior, attitudes toward a behavior could predict the behavioral intentions, and in turn affect the actual behavior jointly with perceived control of the behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Some studies revealed a fairly strong correlation between driving risk attitude and risky driving behavior as well as between driving risk attitude and accidents, with a higher preference to risky driving related to a higher propensity of risky driving behavior and traffic accidents (Iversen, 2004, Ulleberg and Rundmo, 2003, West and Hall, 1997, Yilmaz and Celik, 2004).

Then what role does emotion play in risky driving? How do positive and negative emotions affect driving-related perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors? Generally speaking, after an emotion arises and then “labeled”, it would make people think and behave in line with its bonded appraisal (Strongman, 2003). A positive emotion would lead people to view things as favorable and to approach those things, while a negative emotion raises a tendency to avoid. Such tendencies might spread to anything at hand regardless of how the emotion arises.

According to Affect Infusion Model (AIM) (Forgas, 1995), when people engaged in a deliberating information process, emotion would activate valence-congruent memory or information related to the judgment. When people engaged in a heuristic information process, emotion would serve as a direct input of information in guiding the judgment. Both processes could lead to a valence-congruence judgment of the object. Apart from the traffic area, an earlier research carried out by Johnson and Tversky (1983) found that people showed a higher risk perception of risk events after negative emotion was induced. A recent study about consumer decision-making also revealed that consumers’ positive emotion exert a significantly negative influence on travel-related financial, physical and psychological risk perception, and vice versa (Lin, 2008). When it applies to traffic situation, we predicted that emotion would exert similar valence-congruent effect on people’s driving risk perception. Specifically, positive emotions would lead people to retrieve good components of risk driving, which links to a low risk perception. In contrast, negative emotion would raise people’s risk perception. Slovic, Finucane, Peters, and MacGregor (2007) proposed a similar theoretical framework arguing that risk and benefit perception of a certain event were related, through the mechanism of “affect heuristic”. Specifically, positive affect was related to a lower risk perception and a higher benefit perception, and vice versa for negative affect.

Clore and Schnall (2005) argued that the affective influence on attitude comes from the key common ground that both affect and attitude are evaluative. Emotions serve as a cue in the evaluating process (Cohen et al., 2007). Positive (pleasant) and negative (unpleasant) emotion would lead to good or bad evaluation of an object. A study revealed that people did not accept genetically modified food because of the anxiety and fear about unknown events and dangers (Townsend, 2006). Thus emotion would affect people’s attitude toward risky driving through a mood-congruent manner. We predicted that people with positive emotion would consider faster or riskier driving as more favorable than people with negative emotion. This logic is similar and consistent with risk perception while driving. In the transportation field, researchers have tried to reduce people’s favorable attitude towards some high-risk driving behavior through the use of emotion and shock advertising campaigns (Guria & Leung, 2004).

As mentioned above, emotions would affect people’s tendencies toward approaching or avoiding things, both cognitively and behaviorally. People with positive emotion would be more tempted towards risky driving than with negative emotion. This direct path could exist because the effect of emotion on behavior is sometimes automatic (Strongman, 2003) and thus beyond the cognitive control. In addition, risky driving behavior was influenced by two cognitive antecedents, which are driving risk perception and risky driving attitude. Thus we predicted that positive emotion would increase the risky driving behavior through either lowered risk perception or heightened risk attitude and that negative emotion would have the reverse effect.

In summary as showed in Fig. 1, emotion would affect individual’s driving risk perception (a1), driving risk attitude (a2) and risky driving behavior (b) through direct paths, and the influence on risky driving behavior would also be through two cognitive indirect path (c1 and c2). Positive and negative emotion would exert an opposite effect, with positive emotion reducing driving risk perception and raising driving risk attitude and risky driving behavior, while negative emotion vice versa.

In the current study, we focused mainly on the effect of incidental affect, which was usually resulted from the situation of judgment and decision-making. Mood and emotion are both considered as two different kinds of affective states. Through content analysis, Beedie, Terry, and Lane (2005) offered some major points in discriminating the two states. Emotion arises with clear reasons or causes while mood is only a kind of general affective background. Furthermore, the duration of emotion is usually short and the whole process of an emotion from arising to fading could be easily traced. Mood is a tender and long-term state. These two kinds of states reflect two perspectives for discussing the effect of emotion and it was necessary to test the hypothesized model from these two perspectives. Actually, we could abstract the effects of the two states as a “point” effect for emotion vs. a “period” effect for mood.

Thus we conducted two studies with corresponding methods to verify the proposed model. In Study 1, the emotion induction was employed to examine the “point” effect of positive and negative emotion on risk perception and risk attitude. It is predicted that, in line with the cognitive theory, compared with the control group, the positive-emotion group should have a lower risk perception and a more favorable risk attitude, resulting in a more risky driving behavior, while the negative-emotion group should show opposite effects. While Study 1 was a lab study with strict experimental control, a survey was conducted to explore the relationships among mood, driving risk perception, driving risk attitude, and risky driving behavior during a period of time. It is hypothesized that the proposed model in Fig. 1 would be verified both from these two perspectives.