Towards Empathetic Car Interfaces: Emotional Triggers while Driving

Monitoring the emotions of drivers can play a critical role to reduce road accidents and enable novel driver-car interactions. To help understand the possibilities, this work systematically studies the in-road triggers that may lead to different emotional states. In particular, we monitored the experience of 33 drivers during 50 minutes of naturalistic driving each. With a total of 531 voice self-reports, we identified four main groups of emotional triggers based on their originating source, being those related to human-machine interaction and navigation the ones that more commonly elicited negative emotions. Based on the findings, this work provides some recommendations for potential future emotion-enabled interventions.