Differences in Driving Anger among Professional Drivers: A Cross-Cultural Study.

Public transport systems have a vital role in achieving sustainable mobility goals, diminishing reliance on private individual transport and improving overall public health. Despite that, transport operators are often in situations that require them to cope with complex working conditions that lead to negative emotions such as anger. The current study represents a segment of the permanent global research agenda that seeks to devise and test a psychometric scale for measuring driving anger in professional drivers. The present research is one of the first attempts to examine the factorial validity and the cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the broadly utilized Driving Anger Scale (DAS) in three culturally different countries within the Western Balkans region. The respondents (N = 1054) were taxi, bus and truck drivers between 19 and 75 years of age. The results pertaining to confirmatory factor analysis showed that there were adequate fit statistics for the specified six-dimensional measurement model of the DAS. The measurement invariance testing showed that the meaning and psychometric performance of driving anger and its facets are equivalent across countries and types of professional drivers. Furthermore, the results showed that driving anger facets had positive correlations with dysfunctional ways of expressing anger and negative correlations with the form of the prosocial anger expression. In addition, the results revealed that taxi drivers displayed considerably higher levels of anger while driving and aggressive driving than truck and bus drivers. Overall, this study replicates and extends the accumulated knowledge of previous investigations, suggesting that the original DAS remains a reliable and stable instrument for measuring driving anger in day-to-day driving conditions.

Face and word composite effects are similarly affected by priming of local and global processing.

Holistic processing has been shown with both faces and words, but it is unclear how similar their underlying mechanisms are. In this study attention to global and local features was manipulated and the consequences for holistic word and face processing were examined. On each trial participants were presented two Navon figures and told to focus on either the global or the local level. Then they performed a composite task in which they indicated whether the target halves of two sequentially presented faces or words were the same or different, ignoring the irrelevant halves. Similar stronger global priming effects were found for faces and words, indicating that holistic processing for the two types of stimuli were susceptible to attention manipulations to similar degrees, which was confirmed with Bayesian analyses. The findings add to the investigation of the similarity and differences between holistic processing and help reveal those aspects of holistic processing that are domain general and those specific to individual categories.