Investigating the Influence of Emotion in Air Traffic Controller Tasks: Pretest Evaluation

Air traffic controllers (ATC) have to perform under highly demanding circumstances, and they are often responsible for the lives of more than 5.000 people in mid-air at any given moment. Therefore, besides regular scheduled breaks to recover, it is of paramount importance to be in a level-minded state in order to maximize cognitive capabilities. Within this context and based on our previous research with active air traffic controllers, we designed a comparable scenario in which two airplanes from different directions converge and where subjects have to prevent collision. They watched an emotion inducing video shortly before participating in the experiment. The induced positive or negative valence lead to significant group-differences during their performance of the ATC task.