Effect of Music Intervention Strategies on Mitigating Drivers’ Negative Emotion in Post-congestion Driving

Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in city traffic, which may cause drivers' negative emotion to degrade driving safety. It has been reported that music can regulate human emotion and the influence of negative emotion continuously challenges driving safety in post-congestion traffic. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of different music intervention strategies on mitigating drivers' negative emotion in post-congestion driving. Three experiments (i.e., driving with soft music, driving with disco jockey (DJ) music, and driving without music) are designed to collect drivers' driving performance measures, eye movement and electroencephalogram (EEG) responses in post-congestion driving. The results show that the music intervention strategies influence drivers' eye movement and EEG responses to varying degrees but do not have distinct effect in driving performance measures. These obtained results indicate that designing personalized music intervention strategies might help mitigate drivers' negative emotion to increase driving safety and comfort.