Knowledge Bank

Rates of generalized anxiety have increased dramatically in recent years, particularly in young adults. A substantial percentage of adults of all ages report anxiety while driving, even if they do not experience generalized anxiety. Anxiety can impair a person while driving and could potentially lead to unsafe driving behaviors. When combined with generalized anxiety, the effect of driving anxiety on driving performance may be exacerbated. In addition, previous work indicates that anxiety can impact an individual’s awareness of objects in the environment due to increased cognitive load. Because of this, it is important to study the effects that generalized anxiety and driving anxiety have on driving skills and situation awareness. We hypothesized that those with both driving anxiety and generalized anxiety would show lower situation awareness skills, as well as lower scores in driving behavior measures, such as lanekeeping and speed variability, when compared to individuals with either generalized or driving anxiety (but not both) or to individuals with neither generalized nor driving anxiety. In the present study, 29 young adult students from The Ohio State University were given four questionnaires (the Driving Cognitions Questionnaire (Ehlers et al., 2007), the Driving Behavior Survey (Clapp et al., 2011), the Driving Situations Questionnaire (Taylor & Deane, 2000), and the GAD-7 (Spitzer et al., 2006), to assess levels of generalized or driving anxiety. Participants then drove a scenario in a highly immersive motion-base driving simulator, during which they performed a situation awareness task and responded to “critical” events in the scenario. Overall, the results suggested that the presence of general anxiety, driving anxiety, or a combination of the two does impact driving performance and lower situation awareness. Results are discussed in terms of potential mitigations to reduce driver anxiety, such as creating simulated driving training courses in which anxious drivers could practice real-world situations before encountering them on the road.