Towards Designing Affect-Aware Systems for Mitigating the Effects of In-Vehicle Frustration

Negative affective states such as frustration may lead to aggressive behaviors and have negative consequences on the experienced comfort of drivers. Hence, an affect-aware system which can recognize the current affective state of a driver and react to it appropriately may be able to support the regulation of emotions and to prevent negative consequences. Although research has been reported on the in-car recognition of affective states, very little is known about methods to mitigate frustration using interaction strategies. In this work, we report the results of a workshop with five human factors experts. Three scenarios were discussed and 23 ideas for adaptation strategies generated by the experts. Based on these ideas, we propose four concepts for how to mitigate driver's frustration through affect-aware in-vehicle systems using ambient light patterns. Our goal is to develop, evaluate and demonstrate such systems in the future.