Exploring seafarers’ emotional responses to emergencies: An empirical study using a shiphandling simulator

Abstract

Seafarers are required to make quick decisions to avoid accidents in case of emergencies. However, officers with anxiety generally have a high probability of making wrong decisions that threaten safety and security during the voyage. With the help of a shiphandling simulator, this study aims to investigate the emotional changes of seafarers under simulated scenarios of emergencies. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (S-TAI) scale and electrocardiograph (ECG) signal are adopted to evaluate the emotions of the participant seafarers. To classify the anxiety state of the participants, a support vector machine-based method is applied to establish an anxiety recognition model. Classification results reveal that this proposed model can effectively identify different emotions of participants based on ECG features (cross-validation accuracy: 86.0%; test accuracy: 92.3%). The experimental results show that poor visibility could cause the greatest impact on the anxiety of seafarers. In addition, navigational officers and marine pilots react differently in case of emergencies. Seafarers tend to experience more anxiety when dealing with emergency situations, while marine pilots experience more anxiety during multi-ship encounter periods. Consequently, the findings of this study aid to effectively identify the scenarios that cause anxiety emotion of different professional seafarers, providing the corresponding reference for the training of seafarers. This could help prevent catastrophic accidents that pose a threat to oceans and coasts caused by human error.