Effects of seafarers’ emotion on human performance using bridge simulation

Abstract

75–96% of maritime accidents are caused by human and organizational factors. Seafarers' emotion may degrade the effectivity of human behavior when tasks in onboard environment are complex and demanding. This study was concerned with the relationship between seafarers' emotion and occurring events in navigation. The Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) scale rating are used to investigate the occurrence and impact of seafarers' emotions on their performance using a bridge simulator. The study was conducted and described in two sections: emotion calibration and test recognition. In the first section, two types of emotions are induced by the sound clips of the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS), developed by the National Institute of Mental Health Center for the Study of Human Emotions. In the second section, emotion is recognized by the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, as well as self-rated after the crew-qualified test in a bridge simulator. The results indicate that SVM can identify the emotions by EEG feature extraction, with an accuracy of 77.55%. The results concerning officers' emotion in a bridge simulator test reveal that seafarers’ emotion in maritime operations, relating to events exposure, affects their behavior and decision-making. In addition, negative emotion has a higher likelihood of contributing to human errors than positive emotion. Less negative emotion is the most dangerous emotion state during navigation, followed by extreme positive emotion.