Experimental design for a psychophysiological driving simulator study

This research effort describes a methodology to investigate the effects of personality and emotion on driver behavior. The methodology detailed in this paper has four main components: development of psychological personality surveys, development of psychological emotion surveys, physiological data collection, and development of simulator scenarios. There were three simulator scenarios used in this study: a base scenario, an anxiety scenario, and an anger scenario. 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 results show that there can be drastic differences in driver behavior in different emotional states. The tendencies are that drivers become more aggressive and show smaller headways when they are angered. The results also show that drivers have different emotional responses to the same stimuli.