Dr. Carmen Lilí Rodríguez, international academic coordinator of the Fundación Universitaria Iberoamericana (Iberoamerican University Foundation, FUNIBER), participates in a study that analyzes the impact of emotions on the aggressive behavior of drivers on the road.
Traffic accidents continue to be one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In Spain, 104,080 accidents with victims were recorded in 2019, causing 1,755 fatalities. These numbers highlight the importance of traffic accidents as a serious social problem that requires attention to better understand its main causes.
It has been consistently demonstrated that human behavior, in particular driver error, plays a significant role in traffic accidents, outweighing the influence of vehicle and infrastructure factors. Among driver misbehaviors, aggressive road behavior has been identified as one of the most relevant predictors of risky driving and crash-related events.
The study explains aggressive road behavior based on the theory of anger and aggression proposed by Spielberger. According to this approach, anger is an emotional state characterized by feelings of irritation that can vary in intensity due to provoking situations and that is sustained over a certain period of time. Anger is associated with a clear behavioral expression of aggression and a low ability to cope with the provoking situation.
There are five ways of expressing anger at the wheel: verbal, loud insults; physical, raising a fist to express anger; vehicle-related, speeding up to annoy another driver; displaced, expressing anger towards someone innocent; and adaptive or constructive, taking a deep breath to calm down.
On the other hand, driving-related stress has been highlighted as an important predictor of road rage, even more relevant than other factors such as risky driving. However, it has also been observed that stress does not only occur during driving, but may also be related to work-related stress and other stressors in life.
Taking into account the temporal-spatial distance between the stressors and the driving aggression event, several variables may act as mediators in this relationship. The most important could be emotional dysregulation, which refers to the inability to effectively regulate emotions, which can lead to an inappropriate manifestation of aggression in stressful situations. In this context, the importance of emotional dysregulation in the relationship between stress and driving aggressiveness has been studied.
The results of the research showed that both negative emotions and emotion dysregulation are linked to unsafe (aggressive and risky) driving, as well as to increased risky behaviors such as substance use. Lack of access to emotional regulation strategies could be the cause of drivers adopting reckless driving styles. Likewise, drivers with aggressive behaviors have greater difficulty controlling their emotions.
In short, the problem of traffic accidents is a crucial social challenge that requires attention at all levels. Aggressive road behavior has been identified as an important factor in the occurrence of accidents, and this behavior may be related to stress and emotional dysregulation. These findings may be useful for developing more effective crash prevention strategies and improving road safety for all road users.
To learn more about this study, click here.
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