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 Contacts | List of Past Media Interviews | Photos | News Stories and Book Reviews | Road Rage Book Excerpts | About Leon James
Complete list of academic publications available here: Email: DrDriving@DrDriving.org |
About Dr. Diane Nahl -- Academic Resume
“Chain of Choices” looks at the choices that each driver makes every day. Proper following distance, common courtesy road rage, driver distractions are covered along insight from Dr William Glasser and Dr. Leon on why people choose the driving behaviors they do. View a short-clip from “Chain of Choices”
The Legend of DrDriving Explained--
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by Leon James Myths are individual characters or social causes that every mind contains from birth and socialization or upbringing. Examples include "God," "angel," "the voice of my conscience," "father of my country," "humankind," "playing the fool," "forest preservation," and "universal literacy." When these mythical characters and causes in our mind take on a historical identity or geography, they are known to us as legendary heroes like "Jiminy Cricket," George Washington," "the Three Stooges," "Smokey the Bear," or "Dr. Seuss." The myth of "DrDriving" was discovered by Leon James after years of witnessing his thoughts and feelings behind the wheel while driving as partners with his wife Diane. One beautiful Sunday afternoon in 1982 on the island of Oahu, after dropping off Diane's Grandma on our weekly visits with her, Diane tells Leon that Grandma tells her that "Leon is not a very good driver." Piqued, Leon demanded to know what was wrong with his driving. One thing turns out to be the way he makes his turns: Grandma at 92 who sits in the back, gets thrown against the door. She complains to Diane that this is bad driving. Leon dismisses the complaint as "ridiculous." "Let her hold on to the door handle" was his answer. Then Diane confesses she had been meaning to tell Leon things about his driving -- the things he did that scared her and made her fear for her safety, like switching lanes without looking over the shoulder and turning on the signal before starting to move into the other lane instead of simultaneously. But she held back, she confessed, fearing Leon's negative reactions that she had encountered on those few occasions that she did start talking to him about what she was scared of when being a passenger while Leon was driving: namely, his denial, anger, accusations, hostility, bad mood, silence, retaliation, defiance, resistance. Finally, after much persistent and courageous pleading by Diane, Leon agreed to have Diane tell him when she felt unsafe. That's when the idea of partnership driving was born.
What Leon experienced when he agreed to let Diane tell him about his driving, was his own (sub-conscious) resistance to being a really competent, supportive and peaceful driver. He was an individualist driver
All this was hidden from his conscious awareness! He had an excellent reputation of himself as a driver. He often claimed that he was an excellent driver with an excellent record. So when Diane started to courageously point out Leon's mistakes, one by one, he resisted. He denied the errors. He argued against her objective perception and observation. Leon could not admit to his own driving mistakes because he made himself blind to them. In his own mind, Leon was "an excellent driver" with few tickets and only three minor crashes in over 30 years of daily driving. But Diane persisted, and Leon began to take her seriously by acknowledging her observations and beginning to witness for himself what kind of driver he really was. He became a witness to his own aggressiveness, hostile feelings, competitive style, irrational thinking, excessive risk-taking, rushing all the time, and a number of habitual errors he was making as a driver. He made attempts to change, but in vain. He kept sliding back at the first opportunity, sometimes getting worse instead of better. Leon and Diane were in a desperate situation. Their entire relationship was at stake, suffering from Leon's rebellion and selfishness. At last Leon decided to tackle this problem like a psychology coach -- he was after all a psychology professor! He was going to systematically modify his driving personality, piece by piece, building up from scratch a new driving persona --more competent, more civilized, less defensive, happier, nicer, calmer.
Leon's DrDriving taught him how to change and how to keep improving on a lifelong basis. He discovered that as soon as he dropped his guard, ignoring the voice of DrDriving, he fell back into his old evil and dangerous ways:
Without Dr. Driving in the forefront, Leon's mind was playing out other driving legends, characters with dangerous and mean lives: Road Warrior, Mr. Hyde, Road Runner, Road Jackass, Vigilante Cop, Mad Max, and many more! But with DrDriving kept in the forefront of his mind, Leon was able to put these bad driving characters to the side, as mere powerless legendary heroes of a bygone era in his biography! As long as DrDriving is allowed to keep guard, these harmful characters are not allowed to return to action. They have been dispossessed of their legendary powers in the mind, hence on the individual's driving style. Everyone's DrDriving turns out to have an arsenal of inner power tools that are effective in defeating these legendary characters in our mind and culture. Leon and Diane began to tell other drivers about Everyone's DrDriving. As traffic psychology educators, they encouraged students and friends to put a tape recorder in the car and to start recording their thoughts by speaking them out loud. What an amazing discovery then happened. When these drivers began to witness themselves and tried to modify their driving habits, they came up against the inner resistance to change. Each driver then discovered DrDriving within themselves. It was the voice of their driving conscience, now empowered by the self-modification attempts. For example, as the drivers were trying to stop following too close, or to signal every lane change, or to be nice to their passenger, their DrDriving gave them the motive and the rationale for doing it and to keep doing it. ABOUT DIANE NAHL -- Academic Resume ABOUT LEON JAMES -- Academic Resume Personal Background: U.S. citizen; Ph.D., Psychology, McGill University,1962 Employment History
Dr. James is a US citizen residing in Hawaii. Since 1971 he has been Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. Prior to that, he has taught at various universities since earning his Ph.D. at McGill University in Montreal, including Laval University (Quebec), University of Wisconsin (Madison), and University of Illinois (Champaign). He has headed the Driving Psychology Program at the University of Hawaii (Manoa) since 1982. In recognition of his expertise, he was appointed by the Mayor to the Oahu Traffic Safety Council and is serving on the Governor’s Impaired Driving Task Force that is responsible for new legislative programs and law enforcement initiatives with regard to aggressive driving. In July 1997, Dr. James gave expert testimony on aggressive driving to the House of Representatives in Congress, along with other experts such as Dr. Ricardo Martinez, head of NHTSA, and Dr. Arnold Nerenberg, a road rage psychotherapist in California. Besides training students at the University of Hawaii, Dr. James has an active presence on the World Wide Web where he is known as DrDriving (the Web address is: DrDriving.org). Hundreds of thousands of people use his Web-based instructional materials and tests, and write Dear DrDriving letters which Dr. James personally answers. For the past five years, as Road Rage has become a general issue of concern, Dr. James has given over 1000 interviews to reporters and guest appearances on radio shows across the country. A list of these interviews, and some of the content, is available at www.DrDriving.org/about/interviews4.htm Dr. James, a full fledged member of the American Psychological Association since 1962, has published several academic books and dozens of experimental reports in the professional research literature. He was awarded federal government research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Mental Health, and serves on the Editorial Board of several professional journals in psychology. He is a member of the National Advisory Panel for the American Institute for Public Safety (AIPS) and along with his partner and colleague, Dr. Diane Nahl, he has authored a video course for AIPS called RoadRageous, which is in response to the need for more instruction in driving psychology, not just in safety education. Dr. James is the founder of the new field of Driving Psychology, which emphasizes lifelong driving self-improvement programs. His proposals include such novel ideas as Quality Driving Circles (QDCs) and Driving Personality Makeover Techniques. For the past twenty years Leon James has taught driving personality makeovers to his traffic psychology students at the University of Hawaii. His special focus on driving began when his wife's grandmother complained about how he cornered too fast. Other problem behaviors surfaced in subsequent discussions, like signaling too late or changing lanes unnecessarily to get ahead. As a social psychology professor he began applying scientific techniques to modify his driving style. He recorded his thoughts while driving with a voice-activated tape recorder during hundreds of trips, and later listened to the tapes and analyzed them. He analyzed tapes of hundreds of other drivers, and gradually realized that all drivers experience emotional challenges in today's chronically congested driving environment. Together with Dr. Diane Nahl, his wife and constant driving partner, Dr. James created the new field of Driving Psychology. Its main focus is to teach self-modification techniques for driver self-improvement. In1997 James presented a Lifelong Driver Self-Improvement program in congressional hearings. He proposed a K-12 driver education curriculum described in the book. James and Nahl argue that children acquire their initial driving lessons as passengers in their parents' cars. They give evidence that one's degree of aggressiveness as a driver is related to what we recall about our parents' driving style. They caution that we are breeding the next generation of aggressive drivers, and they developed aggressive driving prevention activities for parents to do with their children. Dr. James and Dr. Nahl have given over one thousand interviews and media appearances in the past eight years. A list will be found here: www.drdriving.org/about/interviews4.htm Besides teaching driving psychology, Dr. James has served on traffic safety organizations and has consulted with national, state, and private organizations in transportation and safety. He is co-author of the RoadRageous Aggressive Driver video course and has created aggressive driving prevention workshops for law enforcement and commercial drivers. He is known on the Web as DrDriving and has answered thousands of Dear Dr. Driving letters. His DrDriving.org site receives thousands daily visitors looking for advice or research on road rage and aggressive driving. Dr. James was born in Europe in 1938 and migrated through several countries in his early years. By the time he learned English at 16, it was his eleventh language. In 1962 he earned a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has authored several books on the psychology of language and published dozens of scientific articles in professional journals. Dr. James has been interviewed by hundreds of reporters in the past three years and has been a central contributor to the new aggressive driving awareness in legislation, the media, and the safety professions. He has lived in Hawaii since 1971. Dr. Leon James is Professor of Psychology and has been part of the Social-Personality Program since 1971. His special areas of interest include driving psychology, cyber-psychology, information literacy, applied psycholinguistics, and theistic psychology. His recent work includes
Dr. James does occasional reviews for Second Language Learning, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, and the International Journal of Psycholinguistics. He also maintains two World Wide Web sites where thousands of readers write to consult him as "DrDriving" and where he publishes study materials and research reports for scholars, students, safety officials, driving school instructors, and government agencies relating to transportation. =============== Complete list of academic publications available here: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leonpublish.html RoadRageous is the first nationally distributed aggressive driving course used in driving instruction, by courts, law enforcement, and military bases. The course is available online as well: see this address: www.aipsnews.com/roadrageous.html Road Rage and Aggressive Driving (Prometheus Books, NY, 2000) is the first comprehensive book on a subject that has been in the media headlines since 1996. It covers the societal context of legislation, enforcement, education, psychology, and citizen activism, in addition to the personal stories of the victims and the perpetrators of highway warfare. James and Nahl give a detailed description of the driver's private world behind the wheel. Their unique self-witnessing technique has motorists record themselves by thinking aloud while negotiating in traffic, capturing the life drama of the driver's thoughts and emotions. The authors uncover the cultural roots of hostility behind the wheel that sets drivers against each other, tracing it to childhood when we are driven by impatient and aggressive adults. The increasing stress of driving influences health, crash statistics, rising costs of injuries and traffic deaths, and other forms of human suffering. Getting angry and driving aggressively is a learned habit that can be unlearned with the effective methods described in the book. Each chapter contains checklists and tests that readers can use to assess their own road rage tendency. Emotional intelligence as a driver is a critical concept that involves first, becoming aware of automatic negative reactions and thoughts, and second, substituting positive alternatives. Examples of negative thinking in routine driving situations are provided, and how to transform these reactions to retain control in emotionally charged situations. The varieties of aggressive driving behaviors are outlined--the rushing maniac, the Jekyll-Hyde persona, the automotive vigilante, the left lane bandit and others. James and Nahl have discovered that at times every driver has these types of reactions. You'll find descriptions of the authors' three-step program, their RoadRageous video course, the results of their aggressive driving polls, and scenario analysis exercises to practice critical thinking to help you develop emotionally intelligent driving skills. This book is for everyone because whether you drive, ride, walk or bike we are all touched by the driving crisis. This book shows that driving is not an individual activity, it is a community activity where every person can contribute to a safer driving environment. After reading the book you will want to buy one for your spouse, teen driver, an elderly driver, friend, or employee. Commercial drivers and law enforcement will find this book equally informative and relevant. Excerpts of the book available here: www.drdriving.org/articles/book_toc.htm BOOK ENDORSEMENTS
Complete list of academic publications available here: List of Media Interviews || Photographs More excerpts from the road rage book | Principles of Christian Driving Psychology | Dr. Leon James Congressional Testimony | Articles on Road Rage and Aggressive Driving | Research Literature | Facts | Surveys and Tests |