Yesterday, I was the victim of an aggressive driver suffering from road rage. Driving down a quiet road for a Sunday drive in the country, the other driver pulled behind me honking his horn. So I slowed down. At a stop sign, he pulled up next to my car and began screaming insults at the top of his voice, before driving off. What the heck was he thinking? Afterwards, I found this interesting Taxonomy of Road Rage by Drs. Leon James and Diane Nahl:
"My cumulative research using the self-witnessing reports of hundreds of drivers, reveals an agitated inner world of driving that is replete with extreme emotions and impulses seemingly triggered by little acts. Ordinary drivers can display maniacal thoughts, violent feelings, virulent speech, and physiological signs of high stress.
'Right now I feel scared, anxious, fearful, panic stricken, agitated, bothered, irritated, annoyed, angry, mad. I feel like yelling and hitting. I'm thinking, Oh, no what's he doing. What's happening. How could he do that. and I hear myself saying out loud, @#$% Stupid guy! I'm breathing fast, gripping the wheel, perspiring, sitting up straight and slightly forward, my eyes are open and watching straight ahead.'
This incident involved a car cutting into the lane and forcing the driver to slam on the brakes causing a chain reaction; however, no collision occurred. The self-witnessing reports of drivers routinely contain scary incidents of this sort in which near misses occur. Hence it has become normal and usual for drivers to experience stress and panic under everyday traffic conditions. The following is a summary of the variety of negative reactions routinely mentioned in driver self-witnessing reports.
Extreme Physiological Reactions: heart pounding, momentary stopping of breathing, muscle spasms, stomach cramps, wet hands, pallor, faintness, trembling, nausea, discoordination, inhibition, visual fixation, facial distortion, back pain, neck cramp.
Extreme Emotional Reactions:outbursts of anger, yelling, aggressive gestures, looking mean and glaring, threatening with dangerous vehicle manipulation, fantasies of violence and revenge, panic, incapacitation, distortion, regressive rigid pattern of behavior, fear, anxiety, delusional talk against non-present drivers and objects.
Extreme Irrational Thought Sequences:paranoic thinking that one is being followed or inspected, addressing other drivers who are not within ear shot, script writing scenarios involving vengeance and cruelty against 'guilty' drivers, denial of reality and defensiveness when a passenger complains of a driver's error, psychopathic interactions as when two drivers alternately tailgate each other dangerously at high speed.
These findings raise an important public issue: What is the mental health of the nearly two hundred million licensed drivers in North America? Demographic sampling research with the self-witnessing method is needed to assess the generality of my early findings. We need to create behavioral maps of drivers under varying social and psychological conditions in order to construct a comprehensive theory of driving behavior within the language of drivers, not the language of scientists. Managing the future of driving in our society requires a knowledge of driving psychology because it provides the content needed by instructors, safety officials, law enforcement, and all regulatory agencies in society that administer roads, cars, and drivers. I use the phrase 'driving informatics' (Nahl, 1999) to cover the entirety of information sources society now needs to manage its expanding driving and automotive environment."
