ABSTRACT
Introduction
Although traffic research offers considerable scope for studying the role of emotions in driving (for a review, see Pecher et al., 2011), the role of sadness in drivers' behaviour has rarely been investigated. By definition, sadness is a reaction to a loss or to an unsatisfied need (Lazarus, 1991; Oatley and Johnson-Laird, 1987). The events that trigger this emotional state are therefore not related to the driving situation but are dependent rather on drivers' attributes and history. from a methodological perspective, this indirect relationship between sadness and driving is a major barrier to the development of empirical work. Nevertheless, an experimental alternative to natural sadness may be used and this study is devoted precisely to understanding the effects of sadness on drivers' behaviour, using emotional induction and a simulated driving task.
