Report 3

The Psychology of It All: Applying Traffic Psychology to Others

How does the Affective, the Cognitive, and the Sensorimotor apply to everyday situations?

One incident that I retrieved from the Generation Curriculum was that of Rochelle Tactatan. As she was observing her driving techniques, she comes across this...

"...when I was driving on the freeway going town bound, right at the Red Hill side when I failed to turn my head on my left side when coming to a merge and there's an upcoming vehicle and I did not see the car on my side mirror. I was shocked and blushed of what I did because I thought a massive crash would occur, but thank goodness the other driver pressed on his brakes and let me pass in front of her."

An explanation

Phew! She sure needed to take a breather in that sentence! Anyways, in analyzing something that is regarded as a habit as she did previously, one must look to the Affective, the Cognitive, and the Sensorimotor parts of the incident.

The Affective part is the feelings or the motives. What I got was that she felt confident and ignorant.

Next is the Cognitive or the thought process involved. She thought that there was no need to look because she was almost confident that a car would not be there.

All this leads to the Sensorimotor part...drums please...the action. She kept on going with the heavy foot on the gas pedal.

To summarize, her negative affective led to her negative cognitive and that led to her negative sensorimotor domain.

Let's try to see if we can analyze this even further. A postive cognitive could be thinking that she does not want an acccident to occur. So she should be aware, not only then but always. So then a positive affective from there could be feeling cautious and respectful. Then that altogether would lead to a positive sensorimotor domain of being aware at all times and changing the habit to a more safer habit.

Another one I found was Soliman Valdez's incident that he found while he too was monitoring his driving.

"I tried really hard but it seemed like every car in front of me was driving too slow. Eventually, I found myself speeding way above the speed limit of 55."

The Affective part could be that he felt impatient or inconsiderate.

As for the Cognitive part, he thought that he was going to be late for practice if he did not rush. He felt that he was justified in his affective, so that leads to the Sensorimotor.

The sensorimotor domain is the fact that he stepped on the gas pedal with a heavy foot. Analyzing this more, again this is an example of a negative affective leading to a negative cognitive leading to an unfortunate negative sensorimotor. To try and work on this even deeper, we will find changes that will change his negatives into positives. A positive cognitive would be thinking that in order to avoid rushing, he could actually get ready earlier. As a postive affective he would not be feeling impatient instead he would feel calm and considerate. The result? A lighter foot on the gas pedal!!!!

Yeehaw! How'd I do?

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