The mediating effects of emotions on trust through risk perception and system performance in automated driving
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2025.103642
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Summary
This study investigates the mediating role of emotions in shaping trust in automated vehicles (AVs), addressing a gap in literature that has traditionally prioritized cognitive assessments over affective responses. Motivated by declining consumer adoption rates and the critical need for calibrated trust to prevent misuse or disuse of AV technology, the research examines how risk perception and system performance influence emotional responses, which in turn affect trust. The authors aim to determine whether trust is driven more by pre-existing risk beliefs or by real-time experiences with AV behavior. The researchers conducted a mixed-subjects experiment with 70 participants who viewed real-life recorded videos of AVs operating either with errors (e.g., navigation failures, lack of transparency) or without errors. Risk perception was manipulated as a between-subjects factor through informational videos emphasizing high risk, low risk, or no risk information. Participants reported their emotional states using a 19-item discrete emotion scale and rated their trust using the Situational Trust Scale for Automated Driving. Physiological arousal was also monitored via galvanic skin response and heart rate. Data analysis included exploratory factor analysis to identify underlying emotional constructs and linear mixed-effects models to test mediation pathways. Exploratory factor analysis identified four key emotional components: hostility, confidence, anxiety, and loneliness. Results indicated that while risk perception manipulation significantly influenced initial learned trust, it did not significantly predict situational trust during the driving scenarios. Instead, AV performance and individual differences were significant predictors. Mediation analysis revealed that confidence acted as a strong positive mediator between AV performance and trust, whereas hostility and anxiety negatively mediated this relationship. Loneliness did not significantly mediate trust. Notably, perceived risk was significantly higher in error conditions regardless of prior risk information, suggesting that real-time system behavior overrides pre-existing risk perceptions. The findings suggest that trust in automated driving is primarily experience-based rather than shaped by prior cognitive beliefs about risk. Real-time AV behavior directly influences emotional responses, which then calibrate trust levels. The study underscores the importance of fostering positive emotional responses, such as confidence, while mitigating negative emotions like anxiety and hostility, to achieve appropriate trust calibration. These results have significant implications for user experience design in automated driving, highlighting the need for systems that not only perform reliably but also actively manage user affective states to ensure safe and effective human-AV interaction.
Key finding
Confidence positively mediated the relationship between AV performance and trust, while hostility and anxiety negatively impacted trust, indicating that real-time system behavior is more influential on trust than pre-existing risk perceptions.
Methodology
lab_experiment
Sample size: 70
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-06 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 5 | 2026-07-02 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
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