Treatment of Road Rage in Private Practice (Part I)
“Road rage” is a potentially dangerous phenomenon that has broad ranging personal and societal impacts for each of us. As such, road rage has been the subject of significant public, media, and governmental attention around the world since 1988, when a newspaper reporter coined the term—in response to the much- publicized “epidemic” of road violence in Los Angeles at the time. Of course, humans have been at conflict on the road long before “road rage” or even motor vehicles, with references going back to the life of Lord Byron—who in the early 19th century reportedly was involved in numerous horse-led violent roadway confrontations—and around 420 B.C.E. when Sophocles’ penned the fictional right-of-way dispute that led to Laius’ death at the hands of Oedipus.
In our time, however, most of us are used to seeing media images of finger flipping, fists flying in the air, and enraged drivers waving baseball bats at other drivers. Every year thousands of drivers around the world are wounded, maimed or killed by those who use their weighty vehicles, hand-held weapons, or bare hands to deliver messages of aggression to their fellow drivers.
My interest in researching road rage, however, was not to focus on the most blatant, stereotypical, newsworthy violent offenders. Rather, I was interested in the anger experiences of the “average” driver who is somehow transformed in what is frequently described as a sort of “Jekyll and Hyde” phenomenon while driving. Why do normally well mannered drivers with generally solid judgment, impulse control, and healthy emotional regulation become significantly triggered by roadway events, turn beet-red, shake their fists, yell denigrating comments, and barely stop short of overtly threatening or assaulting other drivers?
Road rage is a vague and easily confused construct. Some people think that road rage is exclusively overt violent behavior, such as chasing others with your car, threatening or using a weapon, or physically assaulting another driver. Others believe road rage also includes expressions of anger, such as shouting, swearing, or shaking fists. Some associate road rage with their distressful internal reactions to other drivers’ roadway behavior with emotions ranging from irritation and frustration to anger and rage. To address this confusion, the research community mostly abandoned the label “road rage” and has instead standardized the use of terms such as “aggressive driving” and “driving anger.”
Although aggressive driving also includes offenses such as joy riding and speeding, for our purposes it means tailgating, cutting off, flashing one’s lights, aggressive horn honking, blocking, failing to yield, brake slamming, giving chase, threatening with a weapon, car ramming, and other provocative and dangerous vehicular provocations, as well as non-vehicular acts such as making obscene hand gestures, shouting, and swearing. Driving anger is the internal experience—thoughts, feelings, and sensations—that are stirred up in response to witnessing or being victim of offensive or aggressive behaviors by other drivers. These behaviors fit nicely into three anger-inducing categories: Behaviors that threaten us (e.g., our safety, property, or self-esteem); represent injustice (e.g., violation of roadway rules, “stealing” of roadway, impinging on our freedom); or frustrate our goals (e.g., make us lose time or be late; beat us in roadway competition). Our subsequent emotional responses can range from irritation and frustration to losing one’s temper, anger, outrage, hostility, and homicidal thoughts.
Dr. Jerry Deffenbacher of Colorado State University pioneered much of the research on driving anger and found clear evidence for driving anger as both a state and a trait. He found that those with higher levels of trait driving anger have a greater likelihood of experiencing state driving anger at increased frequencies and with greater intensity than those with lower trait driving anger. As we know, the emotion of anger, on it’s own, is not necessarily bad, and in fact is healthy to recognize and understand. However, high driving anger has been linked to higher levels of aggressive driving which leads to increased accidents, costly vehicle damage, roadway violence, injuries, and death.
Based on the brief, simplified summary above, one might get the impression that road rage (or aggressive driving or driving anger) involves linearity of one party’s offensive behavior triggering a second party’s angry reaction. However, like most interpersonal interactions, there is a complicated dynamic at work in which the intentions, motivations, behaviors, attributions, and reactions of the participants become entangled and confused, both on the conscious and unconscious level. It is not uncommon for one driver’s instrumental aggressive driving (e.g., tailgating to push traffic to go faster)—or driving lapses or errors—to trigger another driver’s emotional aggressive driving (e.g., tapping the breaks to thwart the tailgater). Some acts of aggressive driving—such as horn honking or flashing one’s lights—may have ambiguous motives and may fall into either category of aggressive driving depending on how the acts are perceived by other drivers.
The cocoon-like physical characteristic of the automobile and the fluid, mobile nature of most roadway conflicts combine to prevent a number of normal pro-social interpersonal processes, such as clarification of communication and coordination or perspectives. Separated by lanes of traffics and layers of metal and glass, individual drivers are left to their own devices to interpret the roadway behaviors of other drivers. The research in this area—including my own—has shown that the actor-observer bias, the fundamental attribution error, and dispositional biases are commonly involved in drivers’ appraisal of each others’ behavior, and these biases have been associated with higher levels of anger and aggression. Overall, there tends to be a norm for angry drivers to blame others for what is perceived as offensive or aggressive driving behaviors and to minimize or deny one’s own roadway transgressions. Negative judgments and character assassination of the offending driver make it easier for the “innocent” to cast blame and focus anger by taking an imagined moral high ground and denigrating the “other.”
In my study, which hypothesized and found significance for a positive relationship between dispositional failures of cognitive empathy (e.g. social perspective-taking) and trait driving anger, qualitative commentary by subjects revealed a common discovery after participating in the survey. Subjects disclosed that when they started the survey, they viewed other drivers as the “road ragers,” perpetrators of offensive, aggressive behaviors, and they viewed themselves as innocent victims of the road ragers’ behavior and aggressive posturing. After completing the survey, however, a number of participants developed the stunning insight that they are guilty of occasional road rage behavior, including making hand gestures and using the car to express outrage, regain lost roadway position, or exact revenge, albeit without the intent of harming others.
In search of answers regarding causes of driving anger and aggression, examiners have considered a wide variety of possible situational factors that might contribute to driving anger and aggressive driving, including: road congestion, anonymity, presence and type of passengers, vehicle type, near accidents, stress, and environmental factors (e.g., temperature, noise, road conditions, etc.). As one might expect, no one situational factor has been shown to be at the root of driving anger.
Research on demographic variables have provided few conclusions about the roles of gender, socio-economic, racial, and cultural differences in the variability of driving anger, however younger drivers—who also tend to be newer to driving and may be under the influences of hormone shifts, cognitive immaturity, and pro-aggression media programming—have been found to tolerate stress less well, become angrier more often, and drive more aggressively than older—and generally more experienced—drivers.
Road rage is a social and cultural phenomenon, and as such there are countless sources for drivers to learn and adopt both adaptive and maladaptive responses to the driving behavior of others. These sources include parents—who set the tone and model for their children specific emotional responses to social stimuli on and off the road; peers—who especially among teen drivers can negatively influence each others’ attitudes towards driving laws, safety, and interacting with other drivers; the media—where there are daily reminders of the stressors and dangers involved in driving including acts of aggression and violence that may have a priming effect on some drivers; the internet—a relatively recent hub for angry drivers to vent about the “stupidity” of other drivers and rationalize their anger and aggression; and video games—that train our youngest drivers to seek thrills, violate the rights of others, and hunt and kill fellow humans, all while experiencing unrealistic power, control, and invulnerability.
In terms of treatment, research has supported the notion that automobiles and roadways are not simply another setting in which people with anger problems are triggered or displace their generalized anger. Rather, for a significant proportion of the population, cars are the only—or most notable—location in which they experience excessive anger and are prone to behave aggressively. For these drivers, anger treatment that focuses on the unique setting, communication challenges, and psychosocial factors of driving is indicated. The Albany Aggressive Driving Studies (2002) built on much of the prior work in this field (Deffenbacher, 2000, 2002; Larson, 1996) and developed an effective, empirically validated group treatment program that features psycho-education about the impact of driving anger, self-identification as an angry driver, relaxation training, development of alternative coping skills, and cognitive restructuring. Many of these group members are court-referred.
(continued in Part II)...