Article summary of Affect and emotions as drivers of climate change perception and action: A review by Brosch. - Chapter

What is this article about?

This is a review of recent findings concerning the role of affect and emotion in climate change perceptions and judgment as well as their potential as drivers of sustainable action. The affective responses people experience toward climate change are found to be strong predictors of risk perceptions, mitigation behavior, adaptation behavior, policy support, and technology acceptance. Communication and intervention studies show that inducing both positive and negative emotions may under certain conditions promote sustainable behavior. This follows from accumulating research in the affective sciences. The field of behavioral sciences could benefit from incorporation of these concepts and findings from affective psychology.

How can affect and emotion experiences be drivers of climate change perception and action?

Recent research has found that affect and emotions experiences toward climate change are among the most important predictors of climate change-related judgments and behaviors. Recent findings illustrate that affect and emotions play an important role across a wide range of climate change-related judgments and behavioral responses. Because of this, they have the potential to work as levers to promote sustainable behavior change.

Do keep in mind that this research is largely correlational. This means that it is not evident whether affect and emotions are antecedents or consequences of climate change judgments and behavior or whether both are driven by another proces. Understanding the causal relationship is crucial to assess whether the induction of affect and emotions can successfully promote sustainable action.

Multiple intervention strategies have been developed to induce emotions or amplify existing emotions in order to try to motivate sustainable actions. Climate change is sometimes too abstract and distant to elicit emotional responses via experience-based mechanisms. Listening to personal stories about how climate change is harming individuals is a promising way of increasing emotional engagement with climate change. Experimental studies have also investigated the effects of inducing collective guilt for environmental damages. These studies found that emotions need to be specifically related to the climate problem to have significant behavioral effects. It is also very important to keep in mind that there is usually a time delay between the emotion induction and the desired behavior. This is for example the case with purchases or enery saving. In a time delay of over an hour, there is already not much effect anymore of emotion induction and the desired behavior. It is good to consider the demporal dynamics of emotions by placing the message as closely as possible to the desired behavior or by including safeguard mechanisms such as pre-commitments. 

Both positive and negative emotions have been successfully leveraged in climate change communications and interventions to increase intentions and action. But the findings were mixed. This only illustrates that it is important to keep in mind the mechanisms underneath the emotions when designing the intervention. Only if we understand the human emotional systeem well, we can maximize the impact of communications and interventions. Also keep in mind that even thogugh negative emotional messages have also been shown to be effective, people tend to prefer messages without negative emotional content.

The recent findings also illustrate the importance of anticipated affect and emotions as intrinsic motivators of sustainable action. So, it might be good to emphasize the good feeling people will get from pro-environmental behaviors. Emphasizing the positive affect experienced after pro-environmental behavior has been shown to increase intentions to perform a subsequent pro-encironmental behavior. Emphasizing negative affect or guilt did not impact this type of behavioral spillover, which is more reason to focus on positive messaging.