New Spanish Validation Confirms a Five-Dimension Yardstick for How People Perceive Climate Change

How a person thinks about climate change is never a single yes-or-no belief. It is a bundle of attitudes: whether the phenomenon is real, what is causing it, whether its consequences feel bad or good, and how far away those consequences seem in space and time. Psychologists call this cluster climate change perception, and measuring it accurately has become one of the central technical challenges of environmental psychology. A new validation study published in Current Psychology by Mars Carballo-Losada of Universidad Pontificia Comillas, Silvia Collado of Universidad de Zaragoza, José Manuel Caperos, Rocío Rodríguez-Rey and colleagues puts one of the most widely discussed measurement tools, the Climate Change Perceptions Scale (CCPS), through a rigorous Spanish trial. The verdict: the instrument works, and it works in remarkably consistent ways across genders, age groups, political identities and even national borders.

The CCPS was originally developed by Anne van Valkengoed, Linda Steg and Goda Perlaviciute for use in the United States and the Netherlands, and it assesses five distinct dimensions of climate change perception. The first is perceived reality, the degree to which a person accepts that climate change is actually happening. The second concerns perceived causes, capturing whether people attribute the phenomenon to human activity such as burning fossil fuels or to natural processes. The third is valence, the evaluation of whether the consequences of climate change are predominantly negative or, in a minority framing, potentially positive. The final two dimensions are spatial distancing, how geographically remote the consequences feel, and temporal distancing, how far into the future they seem to lie. Together these five factors map the cognitive architecture of how ordinary people mentally represent a global, slow-moving threat.

That architecture matters because decades of research link these perceptions to real-world outcomes. People who perceive climate change as real, human-caused and close at hand tend to report higher risk perception, stronger pro-environmental behavior and greater willingness to support mitigation and adaptation policies. Conversely, psychological distance, the sense that climate impacts belong to other places, other people or distant future generations, has long been suspected of dampening urgency, although recent work, including a 2023 analysis by van Valkengoed and colleagues in One Earth, argues that this distance effect has often been overestimated. Sorting out these competing claims requires measurement tools that behave consistently across populations, which is precisely the problem the Spanish team set out to solve.

The motivation for the new study was controversy. Since its introduction, the CCPS has attracted debate over its psychometric properties, the statistical criteria that determine whether a questionnaire actually measures what it claims to measure, reliably and with a stable structure. Calls have circulated in the literature for adaptations of the scale in diverse cultural contexts, and an Indonesian adaptation published in 2023 in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology was one earlier response. Spain, with its distinctive political landscape, high public exposure to climate impacts such as drought and heat waves, and an active environmental movement, offered an ideal test bed. If the five-factor structure survived translation and re-validation in a southern European sample, confidence in the scale’s universality would grow considerably.

The researchers recruited 825 Spanish adults with a mean age of 39.77 years and a standard deviation of 16.24, meaning the sample spanned young adults through older respondents. Participants completed the adapted CCPS along with a battery of established instruments, including measures of climate change anxiety, environmental attitudes based on the New Ecological Paradigm tradition, climate change risk perception, prior personal experience of climate change, and self-reported pro-environmental behaviors. The team then applied confirmatory factor analysis, a structural equation modeling technique that tests whether the pattern of correlations among questionnaire items matches a theoretically predicted factor structure. The original five-factor model showed an adequate fit to the Spanish data, meaning the same five dimensions emerged cleanly rather than collapsing into each other or fragmenting unpredictably.

Convergent validity, the degree to which scores on a new instrument correlate with related constructs in theoretically expected directions, was also confirmed. Spanish participants who scored higher on the CCPS dimensions reported significantly more climate change anxiety, more positive environmental attitudes, higher climate risk perception, more direct experience of climate impacts, and more frequent pro-environmental behaviors. This web of correlations is exactly what theory predicts: perception, emotion, cognition and action should travel together. The pattern also aligns with a broader international literature, including meta-analytic work by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues published in Nature Climate Change showing that beliefs about climate change are systematically linked to risk perception and policy support across dozens of countries.

The demographic comparisons revealed a familiar but nuanced social geography of belief. Participants who identified as left-wing scored significantly higher than right-wing participants across the CCPS dimensions, echoing a well-documented ideological divide in climate cognition that has been linked to free-market ideology and motivated reasoning. Environmental activists likewise scored significantly higher than non-activists, consistent with research showing that key climate beliefs are among the genesis points of activism. Age produced a more selective pattern: participants aged 18 to 35 scored higher than older respondents only on the perceived reality and temporal distancing factors, suggesting that younger Spaniards accept the phenomenon as real and feel its consequences as less remote in time, but do not necessarily differ on perceived causes, valence or spatial distance. Gender, notably, did not produce significant differences in this sample.

Perhaps the most technically demanding part of the study concerned measurement invariance, the statistical demonstration that a questionnaire functions the same way across different groups. Without invariance, a difference in average scores between, say, men and women could reflect a difference in how the items are understood rather than a genuine difference in perception. Using sequential tests of configural, metric and scalar invariance, the team established that the CCPS holds its meaning across genders, across levels of environmental activism, across age groups, and, strikingly, between the Spanish sample and the original United States samples. That cross-national invariance is a rare and valuable result, because it licenses direct comparisons of climate perception scores between the two countries rather than treating each adaptation as an isolated instrument.

Reliability results rounded out the picture. The scale showed high internal consistency, meaning items within each dimension correlate strongly with one another, and adequate temporal stability, assessed through test-retest procedures and quantified with intraclass correlation coefficients, meaning scores remain stable over time in the same individuals. The study was approved by the ethics committee of Universidad Pontificia Comillas, all participants gave informed consent, and the underlying data have been deposited openly on Figshare, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and reuse the results. The work was partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and by an internal research call at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, with the funders playing no role in study design, analysis or publication decisions.

For researchers and communicators, the practical upshot is substantial. Spain now has a validated, five-dimension instrument for measuring climate change perception in adults, one that is comparable across genders, generations, political identities and at least two continents. That opens the door to longitudinal studies tracking how Spanish perceptions shift as heat waves intensify and droughts lengthen, to evaluations of whether communication campaigns genuinely reduce psychological distance, and to cross-cultural analyses of why some societies mobilize faster than others. More broadly, the study is a reminder that the science of climate change depends not only on thermometers and ice cores but also on carefully validated questionnaires, because the gap between physical reality and public perception is where policy, behavior and, ultimately, emissions are decided.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of the Climate Change Perceptions Scale in the Spanish adult population

Article Title: Climate change perceptions scale: validation for the spanish population

Article References: Carballo-Losada, M., Collado, S., Caperos, J. M., & Rodríguez-Rey, R. (2026). Climate change perceptions scale: validation for the spanish population. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10114-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10114-8

Keywords: climate change perception, psychometrics, scale validation, environmental psychology, measurement invariance, psychological distance, climate anxiety, pro-environmental behavior, Spain, confirmatory factor analysis, risk perception, Current Psychology