Emotional modulation of urgent and evaluative behaviors in risky driving scenarios

Abstract

This study demonstrated that task features are important factors for the understanding of risk behavior under emotional conditions in driving scenarios. We introduce a distinction between urgent and evaluative behaviors. Urgent behaviors are performed under high time-pressure and, when successful, they will help to avoid high negative outcomes. According to some social psychologists, evaluation is considered a type of value categorization (for example, risk or no risk). Emotional cues in the urgency task make participants slower and less able to discriminate risk from no risk, and prone to positive responses. However, negative emotional pictures speed up the evaluation of risk without affecting the ability to discriminate risk from no risk in a driving scenario.