So it´s kind of bore-out-stress, right?

That might work for me, thank you Michael.

Have participants drink a liter of beer 20 minutes prior to the test with no chance to use a bathroom first!

:-)

Needing to find a restroom on a crowded highway, during rush hour, after leaving late with a belly of coffee is a very real source of stress! It would be equivalent to having young children fighting in the back seat during a family outing!

If we fail to hold onto a sense of humor in a world that seems to be on the brink of chaos, we cannot go forward with important work!

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/0/05/TheHomer.png/revision/latest?cb=20090908145331

;)

Homer’s car looks a bit like mine!

Here is a list of recognised driver stressors:

https://www.healthcentral.com/article/driver-stress-causes-cures

Of these having a following driver, especially in a law enforcement vehicle, resulted in the most stressed behaviour.

Most of the items require a multi-participant VR environment.

Of course the serious issue from a mythological perspective is to establish a measured and standardised “stress” that would be operationally consistent, reliable and valid for different classes of subjects And over time.

The majority of such laboratory inventions are abstractions and have little validity beyond the laboratory setting. Stress studies within the context of cognitive, divided-attention task performance have offered interesting explanations, for instance, of why some drunk drivers get into trouble and have crashes while others, who are equally impaired, do not. Stress clearly can challenge a person’s attention to a complex task like driving.

But defining stress in objective, measurable, and replicable ways is not child’s play. Employing such an operationalized intervention in a controlled experiment becomes a daunting challenge. Doing equivalent research in a natural “real world“ setting takes patience, time, and mythological creativity.

Finally, after succeeding in a laboratory setting the challenge of external validity looms large; sometimes making the laboratory work look sterile and irrelevant to those trying to develop countermeasures.

Ethical issues associated with real world research are also daunting to say the least. Occupational Health and Safety are also with us in practical research contexts.

So we resort to the next best thing, VR in its various forms, which usually finds a path through the Health and Safety/Ethics Committees with whom we work while attempting to advance what we know about driving research..

The Proceedings of Human Factors in Road and Rail Transport (Ashgate) have extensive reports on the areas you are interested in.

From my experience, the physical responses manifest in heart rate, blood pressure, and galvanic skin response provide some objective measures of changes in stress levels in VR environments.

Low level simulations employing VR Driving games provide an easily replicable driving environment with essential vehicle control through force feedback driving wheel, pedals and good sound simulation. Most VR Driving sims provide a high fidelity replay so that scenes can be closely studied (frame by-frame if required) for coding behavioural responses.

The ideal simulation environment would be a fully instrumented virtual reality system enabling multiple participants to interact while under researcher observation. Stress can be induced in a progressive way by increasing the complexity of the environment. Systems that approach virtual reality in visual, auditory and kinesthetic features are extremely costly to develop and while the choice as to what features to add will be open, the generality of findings will be limited to replications of similar environments.

The sports racing fraternity has similar issues instrumenting simulators for training racing drivers. It turns out that instrumenting simulations is not so hard with systems such as MoTeC i2 Pro. This system will provide complete details of the engineering side of participation in a simulation that can report a suitable data stream. The VR Game GTR 2 of a few years back provides one such system. It will connect the data stream produced by the vehicle and the inputs generated by the participant driver producing a layered data set. It is an accurate (objective) way of assessing driver responses (including stress) to changes in the simulation environment.

Adding a second human participant to commercial VR driving simulation is difficult/costly, adding many interacting human drivers to the same simulation is 'hard'.

VR game GTR 2, now Race Room, however does just that.

Increasing stress can be accomplished by altering the physical attributes of the VR environment. Topographic change and climatic change both increase stress reflected in increased driving incidents and eventual slower speeds. Choosing different standardised simulation environments and then creating them is 'hard'. A variety of environments (including public roads) already exist in VR games simulations such as GTR 2. The same system will allow changes in day/night light levels and changes in weather.

Real life accident reports suggest that attempting to apprehend a driver by pursuit contributes to consequent stress that is so high that loss of control occurs very rapidly often with fatal results. It is very easy to replicate this result (loss of control and crash) in a multi-person driving sim (without injuring anyone).

Yes, the human subjects review would be difficult to pass through any IRB that I have chaired In a real world experiment.

This is why quasi-experimental designs are so important; but investigators need to be prepared to move quickly when researchable opportnities arise.

For instance, naturally occurring stressor, such as rush hour traffic congestion, when compared to non-rush hour time periods, could offer a repeated exposure-observation design:

X O

O

X O

O

XO

I

X O

I

X O

From the same location, where X represents

rush hour congestion, many variables could be measured via human or technical observers. Crash frequency, erratic lane changes, tail-gating, use of horns expressing frustration, cell phone use by frustrated drivers, and many other indices would be possible for standardised comparison of rush-hour stressed and non-rush hour stressed “groups”.

Public location observation is ethically pure.

My observations were to be organized over a time sequence, not simultaneously.

My formatting was ignored.

Think observations over linear time lines of days or weeks.

Dear Robert, could you explain, what you mean by "mythological perspective" and "mythological creativity".

I am thinking of stress that is being provoked through a lack of time. Some people might react in this with anxiety, not to be on time, others might get aggressive. I don´t think, those reactions need to be replicable, as I can measure the physical stress-reactions and the driving beaviour.