快猫短视频

ONE afternoon late last year, Gena Foster, a 34-year-old mother of three,
joined the freeway for the short journey to pick up her youngest child from
school in a well-heeled suburb of Birmingham, Alabama. As she merged with the
traffic, her Pontiac sports car appeared to cut in front of a brand-new Toyota
driven by Shirley Henson, a 40-year-old secretary and former cub scout leader
with a teenage son.

According to witnesses, Henson flashed her headlights, whereupon Foster
momentarily braked hard. Over the next four miles, the two drivers played an
aggressive cat-and-mouse game, with both cars weaving from lane to lane. When
they finally left the freeway, Foster got out of her car and ran towards
Henson鈥檚 Toyota, shouting, her arms outstretched. Henson, took a .38 calibre
revolver from her glove compartment, opened her window and shot Foster in the
face. She died almost immediately.

The fate of Gena Foster, one middle-class woman killed by another, stands as
a stark example of a pointless, destructive conflict between total strangers.
When cases such as these make the headlines, they are labelled as 鈥渞oad rage鈥�.
But is there in fact any such thing? Some researchers say they have found that
getting angry at the wheel of a car is just like any other form of anger.
Certain people simply have a short fuse, they say, and drive as they live. Other
experts are starting to become convinced that there鈥檚 more to it鈥攖hat
something about driving can unleash a monster in all of us.

Steve Stradling of Napier University in Edinburgh conducted a questionnaire
survey of drivers in 1997, and found surprising differences between individual
motorists. About a third described themselves as being quick to anger both off
the road and behind the wheel. Another third described themselves as being
placid in both situations. 鈥淎bout two-thirds of them seem to drive as they
lived,鈥� says Stradling.

But it was a different story with the remaining third of the sample. Half
claimed to be quick to release general anger, yet scored low on driver anger.
鈥淭hey may be heroes because they claimed to be able to contain themselves better
on the road than off the road,鈥� says Stradling. But the final one-sixth of the
total sample scored low on general anger, yet admitted to often getting angry
behind the wheel. 鈥淭hey are, if you like, the mild-mannered people who turn into
animals when they get behind the wheel of a car,鈥� he says.

What is it about the car that provokes such negative passions in these
normally meek people? Why don鈥檛 altercations in a bank queue, at the deli
counter or in the train station produce similar effects? Why has nobody ever
taken a swing at someone because they jumped the line for Communion in
church?

We get angry and honk horns or flash headlamps when a slow-moving car in
front blocks our progress. Yet walking on a narrow pavement, we might smile
graciously when we finally overtake someone shuffling along ahead of us. At
Trinity College Dublin, transport psychologist Ray Fuller puts this down to what
he calls deindividuation, the process that prevents us relating to the other
driver as a person.

鈥淲hen we hastily overtake another car, then cut in sharply in front of it, we
look at it simply as being a blue Fiesta, for example, being driven slowly by a
total waster,鈥� Fuller says. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 think that there may be a mother of young
children behind the wheel, maybe on her way to visit her dying father in
丑辞蝉辫颈迟补濒.鈥�

One of the problems with cars, adds Stradling, is that you only get what he
terms 鈥減artial status information鈥� about another driver. 鈥淲e drive on
stereotypes,鈥� he says. 鈥淚n the supermarket you get full status information about
the other person. You can negotiate by facial expression, you can see from the
other person鈥檚 expression that they didn鈥檛 mean it when their trolley got in
your way, or that they are apologetic. And it鈥檚 easier to work out how the other
person is reacting to your behaviour. There is much finer real-time negotiation
of the situation. It tends not to escalate.鈥� But from behind the wheel, it is
hard to read other drivers鈥� facial expressions. 鈥淔ace-to-face contact is vital
for so much social interaction, and it tends to be taken for granted,鈥� says
Stradling.

鈥淚t鈥檚 very difficult to communicate with someone in another car,鈥� agrees
Dominic Connell, a psychologist with the Automobile Association (AA) in Britain
and co-author of a 1995 study that reviewed research on road rage. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not the
same as having just bumped into someone in the street,鈥� says Connell. 鈥淲e have
seen examples where someone trying to gesticulate an apology from a car has been
completely misread.鈥�

Having got angry, why do a significant minority take their anger further?
According to a study by Nicholas Ward and his colleagues at the University of
Leeds, run in association with the AA, roughly 25 per cent respond with
aggressive behaviour like flashing headlamps, tooting their horn, gesticulating
or tailgating. Sometimes it can go as far as getting out of the car to
remonstrate, or even fight, with the other driver.

One view, more prevalent in some cultures than others, is that venting anger
serves as a form of catharsis: keeping it in is harmful, while letting it out
makes you feel better. Research by psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State
University in Ames suggests that people who are emotionally distressed vent
their anger to improve their mood. And in a sense this works鈥攂ut there is
a downside.

According to Bushman鈥檚 experiments, people are more likely to show their
anger if they believe that doing so will help relieve their frustration. When he
showed volunteers fabricated newspaper stories highlighting the alleged benefits
of letting rip, they behaved aggressively towards other volunteers in a game he
gave them to play. Conversely, volunteers who had been given a supposed 鈥渕ood
freezing鈥� pill鈥攖hey were told it would stop them getting either calmer or
more angry鈥攄id not engage in aggressive behaviour even though the
experimenter deliberately provoked them and the pill was a placebo.

Bushman has since shown that venting frustration can make people feel good in
the short term鈥攂ut at a price. It makes them stay angry much longer, which
is hardly a good idea if you鈥檙e driving. In an as yet unpublished experiment,
Bushman invited volunteers to vent their anger by hitting a punchbag, then
assessing how they felt afterwards. He found that 鈥�72 per cent reported feeling
great, but the better they said they felt the more aggressive they became鈥�. They
just carried on hitting the bag. 鈥淧eople who let off steam like that are just
practising how to behave aggressively,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like using gasoline to
put out a fire, you are keeping the anger alive when you yell or scream.鈥�

This work suggests that, with many people, if you are angry when you climb
behind the wheel you are likely to stay angry. It also suggests that in cultures
where people believe getting angry is beneficial, more drivers are likely to
give vent to their feelings.

But some drivers may not need to be upset beforehand, or be culturally primed
to get angry. Their brain chemistry may simply be programmed for rage, according
to Emil Cocarro, director of clinical neuroscience and psychopharmacology
research at the University of Chicago. There are many different neurochemical
pathways that initiate anger and aggression. When provoked, most people鈥檚 brain
chemistry initially responds in a broadly similar way, says Cocarro. But there
is a world of a difference in what happens next.

He suggests that people with a deficiency of the neurotransmitter serotonin
in the frontal lobe of the brain are prone to sudden outbreaks of a form of
anger he classifies as 鈥渋ntermittent explosive disorder鈥�, a syndrome he thinks
should be formally recognised as a medical condition. Cocarro estimates that
between 1 and 3 per cent of the population may have this syndrome. Could a
serotonin deficit be one of the causes of road rage? 鈥淚t鈥檚 probably behind a
fair amount of it and some of the people we have studied were road ragers,鈥� he
says.

鈥淥ne school of thought is that serotonin behaves as an inhibitor in the
frontal lobe of the brain, putting the brakes on aggression. Imagine someone has
just done something to annoy you. The subcortical structures of your brain are
pushing you to react aggressively, but the frontal part of the brain steps in as
a mediator and asks, do you really want to punch this guy? That inhibition is
occurring even before you are aware of it, and gives you time to consider a more
reasonable response. But if the serotonin system doesn鈥檛 function very well,
when the lower centres are stimulated and select the drive for aggression, then
the braking mechanism is not so good and the frontal cortex fails to intervene
in time.鈥�

Yet none of this fully explains what it is about driving that turns an
otherwise normal mother and pillar of suburban society into a gun-toting killer.
One possibility is that when people are angry they are not given to efficient
thought processing, says Marcus Raichle, a neuroscientist at Washington
University in St Louis, and this could have a bearing on the road rage
phenomenon. In a recent experiment he showed volunteers a series of photographs
that could arouse strong negative or positive emotions, or that were emotionally
neutral, and asked people to perform a simple counting task. Those shown the
emotionally charged photos took longer and were less accurate in their cognitive
tasks.

To see which areas of these subjects鈥� brains were most active, Raichle used
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He discovered that in the subjects
shown the emotionally charged pictures, the amygdala and other subcortical areas
closely associated with emotion processing, which are normally 鈥減owered down鈥�
when performing cognitive tasks, instead remained fully active.

鈥淚 think everyone at some stage has been cut off in traffic and had this
instant angry response,鈥� says Raichle. When that happens, he suggests, areas of
the brain that deal with these emotional reactions remain active, and prevent
more rational thinking. 鈥淚n the event of road rage, that鈥檚 bad news. You鈥檙e
likely to do something pretty bad.鈥�

In evolutionary terms, this may make sense. Raichle points out that when our
early ancestors were faced with a predator, a reflexive emotional response would
have been of more use than musing over the merits of this hiding place or that.
鈥淏ut that鈥檚 not appropriate in congested 21st century traffic,鈥� he says.

But even if road rage is a throwback to our distant past, we shouldn鈥檛
overestimate its impact. The number of people like Gena Foster who are killed by
other motorists in road rage incidents is a minuscule fraction of the total road
death toll worldwide. And of those drivers in the Leeds study who claimed to
show their aggression on the road, only a tiny proportion鈥攁round 1 in
2500鈥攔eported that they might assault another driver. Such figures led
Ward and the AA to declare that whatever the newspapers might have us believe,
road rage is far from being epidemic.

But these displays of anger might have other serious consequences. Connell,
the AA psychologist, says it is well established that angry drivers are more
likely to end up in an accident. He cites 1968 research which indicates that
about one-fifth of drivers in fatal accidents had been involved in a violently
aggressive altercation in the previous 6 hours. Applied to British road accident
figures, this could implicate driver anger in 684 deaths in 1999. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an
interesting area for further research,鈥� says Connell. 鈥淭he number of people who
cannot control their emotions and may end up failing to concentrate properly on
driving is probably a bigger problem than so-called road rage.鈥�

Stradling is planning further research into driver behaviour. In particular
he wants to discover what creates what he calls a 鈥渃rash magnet鈥濃�攖hose
people who say they get angry and are also more likely to behave badly on the
roads. 鈥淭he people who do naughty things with a car are more likely to crash,鈥�
says Stradling. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 have enough data to check it out thoroughly but we
are beginning to wonder if there are any really innocent encounters out there on
the road.鈥�

IS AGGRESSION on the road a reflection of aggression and violence in society
generally?

Dominic Connell and Matthew Joint at Britain鈥檚 Automobile Association have
unearthed a possible link between driver anger and the murder rate. They were
prompted by a fascinating finding by an earlier researcher, Francis Whitlock,
who in 1971 described a correlation between violent deaths and road fatalities
in several countries. Whitlock concluded that road deaths and injuries are often
the result of the expression of aggressive behaviour: 鈥淭hose societies with the
greatest amount of violence and aggression in their structure will show this by
externalising some of this violence in the form of dangerous and aggressive
诲谤颈惫颈苍驳.鈥�

Joint and Connell took this a stage further, and looked for correlations
between road fatalities and murders in those parts of Britain where police
districts (which compile homicide figures) and local authority regions (which
compile road death statistics) coincided. Their study of the relevant figures
for 1994 produced a correlation coefficient of 0.7, suggesting, they said, 鈥渁
strong predictive link between road accident and homicide rates鈥�.

A 1995 STUDY for the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic
Safety estimated that at least 1500 Americans are killed or injured each year as
a result of aggressive driving or altercations following traffic incidents.

Another study from 1995, by the British Automobile Association (AA),
estimated that almost 90 per cent of motorists had been on the receiving end of
road rage in the previous 12 months, and 60 per cent admitted to having lost
their temper behind the wheel. Aggressive tailgating (experienced by 62 per cent
of road rage victims) was reported to be the most common form of road rage,
followed by headlight flashing (59 per cent), obscene gestures (48 per cent),
deliberate obstruction (21 per cent) and verbal abuse (16 per cent). Just 1 per
cent of drivers claimed to have been physically assaulted by other drivers.

Despite the popular image of road rage as a testosterone-fuelled macho
pursuit, gender differences were surprisingly small: 54 per cent of women in the
AA study admitted to aggressive driving behaviour, compared with 64 per cent of
men. In a University of Manchester survey of 400 motorists in 1997 which
adjusted for mileage differences鈥攎en drive more than women鈥攖here was
no discernible difference between the men鈥檚 and women鈥檚 propensity for road
rage.