Director: Eric R. Dahlen, Ph.D.
Michael Moore Defends Dissertation on the Driver Stress Profile
10/18/10 Traffic Psychology
Michael Moore, a doctoral student from the Anger and Traffic Psychology Lab who is now completing his predoctoral internship at the Memphis VA Medical Center, successfully defended his dissertation last week, "Further Validation of the Larson Driver Stress Profile." Congratulations soon-to-be-Dr. Moore!
The Driver Stress Profile (DSP; Larson, 1996) is a 40-item self-report measure of four constructs thought to be relevant to aggressive driving: competitiveness, anger, impatience, and punishing other drivers. Michael's dissertation provided initial evidence of the construct validity of a version of this measure after refining it through exploratory factor analysis. Although additional work is needed before this modified version of the DSP can be considered complete, initial results are promising. The revised DSP was found to predict motor vehicle accidents, aggressive driving, risky driving, and driving anger expression. In fact, the DSP was able to explain an additional 20% of the variance in aggressive driving even after accounting for gender, miles driven/week, driving anger, and sensation seeking.
The Driver Stress Profile (DSP; Larson, 1996) is a 40-item self-report measure of four constructs thought to be relevant to aggressive driving: competitiveness, anger, impatience, and punishing other drivers. Michael's dissertation provided initial evidence of the construct validity of a version of this measure after refining it through exploratory factor analysis. Although additional work is needed before this modified version of the DSP can be considered complete, initial results are promising. The revised DSP was found to predict motor vehicle accidents, aggressive driving, risky driving, and driving anger expression. In fact, the DSP was able to explain an additional 20% of the variance in aggressive driving even after accounting for gender, miles driven/week, driving anger, and sensation seeking.