Abstract: Emotion is one of the significant factors that cause traffic accidents. In order to prevent traffic accidents caused by drivers' emotions, a three-level causal decomposition(arousal,reaction,vehicle state) is proposed to further analyze the influences of emotions on driving behaviors. Simulated driving experiments were designed and carried out to collect data on drivers in four emotional states: happy, sad, angry and fear. By using the baseline signal elimination method, the change value of the driver's heartbeat interval, steering angle and maximum lane deviation under different emotional sources were analyzed. The results indicate that all emotions incur significant increases in mean sympathetic arousal accompanied by significant increases in mean steering, that both the happy emotion and the anger emotion will result in a significantly larger range of lane departure, indicating more dangerous driving behaviors, and that both the sad emotion and the fear emotion will result in a smaller range of lane departure, indicating safer driving behaviors.

Key words: emotion, driving behaviors, heartbeat interval, steering angle, maximum lane departure