Livingstone Cap. 1 — Emotions

1. Overview

LIVINGSTONE, Grant H.; LIVINGSTONE, George H. Shiphandling, the Beautiful Game — Volume 1. London: The Nautical Institute, 2025. Chapter 1 — Emotions (self-awareness, Eurich 2018; emotions as signals and stimulus-perception-behavioural response; anger and the Ever Forward grounding; fear and the Eastern Lion near-miss with box breathing; panic the cognitive assassin; anxiety, the dragging-anchor case and self-differentiation).

Anexo 2-B, Seção VII (Conhecimentos Gerais), item VII.6 — LIVINGSTONE v.1, Caps. 1, 3, 11, 12 (Cap. 1 prescrito). Anexo 2-A, Seção VII — fatores humanos: emoções e seu efeito sobre a tomada de decisão sob estresse no passadiço.

This chapter opens the whole book on a single premise: our own emotions shape our own decisions, above all under stress, and that is decisive for good shiphandling. The authors trace it to their earliest sailing — an aversion to hitting anything, "one part embarrassment, two parts panic" — and build from there to the science of the human element.

The foundation is self-awareness. A large Harvard Business Review study (Eurich, 2018) split it in two: internal self-awareness, seeing ourselves objectively, and external self-awareness, getting objective feedback on how others see us. Greater self-awareness improves our grasp of why people behave as they do, and of the link between behaviour and consequence. Clinical studies add an uncomfortable fact: human beings are subjective by nature, not objective, so processing information objectively takes education and training.

Emotions themselves are natural signals — happy, sad, angry, depressed, frightened — that have helped humans survive for thousands of years. The brain interprets sight, sound and sense and sends out a response: this is stimulus perception followed by a behavioural response. Much of it happens subconsciously, in hundredths of a second; we feel the emotion before we can consider it (Schreuder et al, 2016). Without self-awareness, negative emotions can hijack the response.

Objective decision making is foundational to effective shiphandling: all emotions should be fact-checked.

The chapter then examines four emotions in turn — anger, fear, panic and anxiety — each with a real shiphandling case, and each ending in the same discipline: fact-check the feeling before you act on it.

2. Anger

Long periods living and working aboard naturally create stress, and anger is, in part, a motivational emotion. A temporary burst can give a boost of determination and adrenaline: it narrows attention onto the obstacle ahead, dampens the peripheral senses, raises the risk threshold and sends blood to the extremities — exactly what a fight or an extreme physical situation may demand.

But shiphandling needs the opposite. There, anger raises the risk threshold when it should be lowered, and the blood sent to the extremities competes with the supply to the brain. Anger commonly carries over from a past event, colouring judgement in the current situation whether it applies or not; angry people even find angry messages convincing. It interrupts cognition, hijacks attention, slows decision-making and harms memory. Outwardly, an angry handler is read as hostile and domineering, and respect, cooperation and information-exchange break down. The book lists the effects of being angry on a ship: tunnel vision; blaming others; overconfidence and greater risk-taking; a distracted decision process; past anger carried into the present; alienation of the team; and communication ceasing.

2.1 Case Study: the Ever Forward Grounding

On 13 March 2022 the container vessel Ever Forward left Baltimore for the 150 nm passage to the Chesapeake Bay entrance. A linehandling issue had delayed sailing, and the pilot was, in the USCG's words, "in an agitated state" over it. After getting underway he spent more than an hour on mobile-phone calls — some 61 minutes of the 126-minute voyage — and began composing an email just before the ship grounded.

USCG (2022): contributory causal factors included (1) failure to maintain situational awareness and attention while navigating, and (2) inadequate bridge resource management.

The authors argue the root cause was anger — frustration over the linehandlers that, unresolved, hijacked the pilot's attention. There are no long-term studies of negative emotion in shiphandling, but the driving research is suggestive: a Virginia Tech study (2016) found that a driver who is angry, agitated, sad or even excited is ten times more likely to crash. The pilot spent nearly half the transit on his phone; had his attention not been diverted, he would probably have made that routine 19-degree turn as he had for the previous fifteen years. The lesson is blunt: nothing in shiphandling is improved by anger, and anger usually begins as mere irritation, which is just as distracting.

3. Fear

Fear is hard even to define. The neuroscientist Kay Tye frames it starkly:

"Fear is an intensely negative internal state… Fear resembles a dictator that makes all other brain processes (from cognition to breathing) its slave." (Mobbs et al, 2019)

Fear associations are the most rapidly learned of all — often in a single trial — robustly encoded and quick to activate multiple memory systems, which is precisely why fear can seize the bridge. One of the authors illustrates it with a near-miss he lived through, narrated in the first person.

3.1 Case Study: the Eastern Lion Near-Miss

The ULCC Eastern Lion — a 331 m × 51 m single-hull steam plant — was inbound to anchor at 15 m draught. The plan was simple: enter the breakwater on 000°T, turn 90° to starboard and run 090°T between two ships anchored about 1,500 m apart, to an anchor position one mile inside the entrance.

As the ship entered on a 3-degree rate of turn to starboard, the dew point shifted and a low cloud base dropped within seconds to just beyond the bow. The radars were poor and this predated PPU and ECDIS, so the captain ordered "Stop engine" to wait for radar assistance. Then the failures cascaded: no astern response from the main engine on slow then half astern; the starboard anchor ordered let go but it failed; the port anchor too; the tug ordered to pull, but the 3-degree swing kept carrying the bow toward the ship anchored to the north, now just 2.5 cables dead ahead and broadside.

The author describes fear becoming panic — blood literally leaving the extremities, thought processes hijacked. The recovery began by breaking the panic: he turned his back to the windows and took several deep breaths, giving himself a time-out.

US Navy SEALs call this "box breathing" — a deliberate, deep, conscious breath that is the opposite of the fast, shallow breathing of a panic attack, triggering a relaxation response that can be summoned at any time (Devine, in Dube, 2019).

Calmed, he saw the solution in something already true: the rudder was still hard to starboard, so the answer was to come ahead, not astern. Half then full ahead, the engine starting at once; the tug shifted from pulling to pushing full. Hard starboard with power just cleared the bow.

But the stern would not clear, so he shifted the rudder hard to port (full ahead): the bow had cleared while the stern was sweeping toward the anchored ship, and the port shift checked the swing just before contact. Bow and stern cleared past the stern of the anchored vessel — so close that the radar-assist station, seeing the two ships merge, twice asked him to confirm "No contact?".

3.2 Practising Fear, and Fact-Checking It

Fear and defensiveness were justified there; but if fear is allowed to hijack attention into panic, critical-thinking skills vanish when most needed. The point is that fear can be practised against. A 2020 study (Kim, in Reliability Engineering & System Safety) measured handlers in the last moment before collision: less experience meant more nervousness; crossing situations felt far riskier than head-on; and greater fear, measured by heart rate, meant greater chance of panic and failure to act — results that improved with repeated practice. The Swedish Club's 2020 report stresses the same: train the bridge team to take early action and adapt to a continuously changing environment. The safest place to practise emergency manoeuvres, and to feel real fear under control, is the emergency simulator, where a scenario can be rerun and corrected — something impossible at a real berth.

On a ship, when we feel fear, we need facts. If fear is validated by facts, becoming defensive is correct; if not, it may be detrimental. One should always fact-check fear.

4. Panic

Panic is possible in any emergency, so mariners must learn to mitigate and manage it. If fear is the dictator that enslaves the other brain processes, then panic is the cognitive assassin: it shuts down the cognitive functioning needed for problem-solving. No one is immune, however smart or experienced; once entertained, panic is like a floodgate opening, carrying off reason, intelligence and most chances of avoiding an accident.

The book lists its physical symptoms so they can be recognised early: a racing heart; faintness and dizziness; shortness of breath; nausea; hot flashes; numbness or tingling in fingers or toes; a sense of detachment from the surroundings; sweating; shakiness; weakness in the legs; visual changes; an overwhelming desire to escape; and an inability to concentrate. Recognising these is the first step — and how to mitigate panic is developed further in the chapter on managing pressure (Chapter 3).

5. Anxiety

Anxiety, by contrast, is a slower threat. The authors illustrate it with a converted heavy-lift ship — 244 m × 40 m, 45,323 dwt, loaded with five large container gantry cranes free-standing on deck rails — that began dragging anchor at Long Beach when the wind rose in about an hour from 20–25 to 50–60 knots with heavy cold rain. The Master, found "in a state of near-panic" and chain-smoking, had already unsecured the cranes to save time and money, so a grounding could have rolled the ship onto her beam. He could give only manoeuvring full (58 RPM, half of sea speed) and eight shackles on each anchor — out of only 8.5 available for that ship.

With both anchors out, a 60-tonne ASD tug pulling 100 percent, and the engine at manoeuvring full, the ship still drifted astern at 0.25 knots toward a beach only 0.3 nm away. Two things turned it. First, a radar-watch pilot, Captain Reid, steadied the author over the VHF — and his "calm, wry Scottish humour" took the edge off, reset the author's thinking and let new options surface, an effect later supported by research on humour reducing anxiety (Sarink and García-Montes, 2023). Second, that reset produced an insight: a large rudder angle cuts off propeller thrust, because a hard-over rudder blocks the propeller wash — so less rudder gives more thrust. Putting the rudder amidships stopped the astern drift, buying time for the second tug and getting the ship off the lee shore.

"Anxiety is a universal adaptive response to a perceived threat; this response can, however, become maladaptive… Abnormal anxiety is present when it causes unacceptable and disruptive problems in its own right." (House and Stark, 2002)

The shiphandling conclusion mirrors the others, and it carries the whole chapter: emotions are natural signals, but anger, fear, panic and anxiety can hijack the objective thought a safe manoeuvre demands. They can be managed — through self-awareness, practice and, as the next chapters develop, deliberate calm — and every one of them should be checked against facts before it drives a decision.