Development of an emotional car-following model

This research effort proposes a new car-following model that includes the effects of emotion on driver behavior. The methodology used to investigate the effects of emotion on driver behavior has three main components: a psychological personality survey, a psychological emotion survey, and simulator scenarios. There were three simulator scenarios used in this study: a base scenario, an anxiety scenario, and an anger scenario. The design of the study was such that the scenarios induced certain emotions in the participants and those emotions were measured using psychological emotion surveys. The base scenario allowed the participants to interact without any pressure being applied to them. The anxiety scenario applied pressure to the participants through a time limit and police vehicles patrolling the roadway. The anger scenario applied pressure to the participants through aggressive actions by the surrounding traffic. The findings showed that emotions caused drivers to change the distribution of their driving behaviors. The new car-following model uses a markovian process to account for the different distributions of behavior for each emotional state.