A virtual reality-based investigation of driving anxiety in young drivers

Driving anxiety is a critical psychological factor shaping driver behavior, safety decisions, and crash risk, and may be especially salient among young drivers due to their developmental stage and limited driving experience. This study uses immersive virtual reality (VR) technology to safely and systematically examine how driving anxiety affects behavioral, physiological, and subjective responses across realistic traffic scenarios. Utilizing a high-fidelity driving simulator and rigorous experimental design, we compared the performance of anxiety (AG) and non-anxiety (NAG) groups across five complex and realistic driving scenarios. An affirmative feedback intervention was introduced after the initial tasks to assess whether positive performance feedback could mitigate anxiety-related effects. Key measures included self-reported confidence, behavioral performance (speed and response latency), and physiological reactivity (heart rate and heart rate variability). Overall, objective measures showed limited group differences: driving speed, heart rate and heart rate variability did not differ significantly between AG and NAG. In contrast, AG drivers exhibited significantly longer response latencies in high-demand scenarios, the initial sudden-vehicle-intrusion and obstructed-visibility conditions, while this latency gap decreased after affirmative feedback. Exploratory gaze heatmaps suggested scenario-specific differences in visual attention, with anxious drivers showing more localized gaze around hazards in some scenarios and non-anxious drivers exhibiting more dispersed scanning. Study findings highlight that the psychological experience of driving anxiety was more pronounced in self-reported outcomes than in most objective measures, with scenario-specific latency effects. The VR-based framework demonstrated here enables low-risk, replicable examination of anxiety-related driving mechanisms and supports future advances in driver training and psychological-safety research.