Traffic Psychology
News From the Anger and Personality Lab

Five Tips For Managing Anger While Driving

07/16/17
Traffic jam Rio de Janeiro 03 2008 28
We have all experienced feelings of anger toward others while driving. These range from mild annoyance or frustration to intense rage. For some, it is the vehicle in the left lane driving slower than the posted speed limit. For others, it is the reckless driver weaving in and out of traffic. It is in these moments that we may become tempted to do something stupid, something that could place us in danger.

Here are five tips for staying safe in anger-provoking driving situations:

  1. Don't take it personally. It often seems like other drivers must be deliberately messing with you, but this is rarely the case. The "rude" driver who veered into your lane probably did not see you. The person merging onto the freeway slowly enough that you had to brake wasn't waiting for you on the on-ramp just to ruin your day. Others' bad driving is rarely aimed at you.
  2. Avoid name-calling. Even if you manage to refrain from yelling out your window at other drivers, research suggests that calling them inflammatory names (even just to yourself) makes you more angry rather than less angry.
  3. Let go of the need to be right. Your safety is more important than being right. Maybe you were the first to arrive at the 4-way stop and you have the right-of-way. If the other vehicle blasts through the intersection anyway, the fact that it was your turn will not be much consolation when it hits you.
  4. Recognize that if someone else is determined to have an accident, you don't need to be part of it. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to slow down and let the other driver pass you. Maybe the other driver is intoxicated or playing with his or her smartphone. These are drivers you do not want to be close to. If they have an accident, it is better that it does not involve you.
  5. Remember that it is not your job to punish other drivers. We have all had the urge to honk, slow down in front of someone tailgating us, cut in front of another driver, or make obscene gestures to "teach them a lesson." This sort of retaliation may feel good, but it increases the likelihood that you could end up the target of someone else's road rage.
Keeping one’s cool on the road is not always easy, but it is an important part of safe driving. We have no control over how others drive, but we can learn to manage our responses to other drivers’ behavior.

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Dr. Dahlen Appointed as Associate Editor

08/18/16
Photo of open book with glasses and a highlighter
After serving as a member of their Editorial Board for several years, I was recently offered and accepted an appointment to serve as an Associate Editor at Accident Analysis & Prevention (AAP). AAP is a peer-reviewed journal published by Elsevier and affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine. They publish research on accidental injury and damage from a variety of disciplines, including "studies of human, environmental and vehicular factors influencing the occurrence, type and severity of accidents and injury; the design, implementation and evaluation of countermeasures; biomechanics of impact and human tolerance limits to injury; modeling and statistical analysis of accident data; policy, planning and decision-making in safety." Many of the articles they publish involve investigations of human factors in transportation-related accidents, which is consistent with the lab's work in clinical traffic psychology.

As with any new responsibility, I expect a bit of a learning curve; however, I am excited by the opportunity to learn more about the editorial process and contribute to the field in a new way.

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Michael Moore Defends Dissertation on the Driver Stress Profile

10/18/10
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.

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Article on Driving Anger and Boredom Proneness Makes AAP's Top 20 Most Cited List

09/20/10
I was just informed by Elsevier that a 2005 article we published in Accident Analysis and Prevention was one of the top 20 most cited articles from this journal published between 2005 and 2010. The citation of the article is:

Dahlen, E. R., Martin, R. C., Ragan, K., & Kuhlman, M. M. (2005). Driving anger, sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and boredom proneness in the prediction of unsafe driving. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 37(2), 341-348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2004.10.006

The study examined the role of impulsivity, sensation seeking, boredom proneness, and driving anger as predictors of aggressive and risky driving in a college student sample. In addition to providing further support for the utility of the Driving Anger Scale (DAS; Deffenbacher et al., 1994) in the assessment of unsafe driving behavior, we found that sensation seeking, boredom proneness, and impulsivity resulted in incremental improvements to the predictive model over and above driving anger. Overall, this helps to strengthen the case for using multiple predictors to understand risky and aggressive driving.

It is great to know that others have found this paper useful in their research.

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