Climate Anxiety Comes in Five Distinct Types, Study of 1,650 Adults Finds

Climate change anxiety has often been treated by researchers and clinicians as a single dial that turns up or down from person to person. A new study from Türkiye argues that this one-dimensional picture is misleading. Instead of a smooth continuum of worry, the research identifies five qualitatively different psychological profiles of eco-anxiety, each with its own cognitive and emotional signature. The findings, published in Current Psychology, suggest that what separates people who are mildly concerned about the planet from those whose functioning is genuinely impaired is not how darkly they view the future, but how well they regulate their emotions and how much uncertainty they can tolerate.

The study was led by Abdullah Mücahit Aslan of Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, together with Hayri Koç of Necmettin Erbakan University and Zeynep Şimşir Gökalp of Selçuk University. The team recruited 1,650 adults aged between 18 and 67 from 41 provinces across Türkiye through online sampling, a design that captured considerable geographic and demographic breadth. Participants completed the 13-item Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale, a multidimensional instrument that measures affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of climate-related distress, alongside validated measures of dark future perception, intolerance of uncertainty, and difficulties in emotion regulation.

Rather than simply correlating these variables, the researchers applied latent profile analysis, a person-centered statistical technique that searches the data for hidden subgroups of individuals who share similar response patterns. Where variable-centered methods ask how two traits relate across a whole sample, latent profile analysis asks whether the sample is better described as a mixture of distinct types. Using standard fit criteria from mixture modeling, including comparisons across competing solutions, the analysis converged on a five-profile solution as the optimal balance between statistical parsimony and explanatory detail.

The five profiles were far from mirror images of one another. The largest group, accounting for 34.3 percent of the sample, was labeled Environmentally Concerned: these individuals reported meaningful worry about climate change without the emotional and cognitive burden that would compromise daily life. Close behind, at 29.5 percent, was a group the authors called Cognitively Preoccupied, in which climate-related rumination and intrusive thoughts stood out relative to other symptoms. A third group, the Eco-Resilient, comprising 17.3 percent of participants, showed the lowest levels of eco-anxiety across dimensions. The remaining two groups carried the heaviest burden: the Emotionally Distressed profile, at 8.2 percent, was characterized primarily by intense affective symptoms, while the Highly Eco-Anxious profile, at 10.8 percent, showed elevated scores across all dimensions of the scale.

One of the study’s most theoretically important observations is that these profiles did not simply represent the same symptoms scaled up or down. The Cognitively Preoccupied group, for example, was not uniformly more anxious than the Environmentally Concerned group; instead, its members showed a distinctive pattern in which cognitive symptoms dominated. This kind of heterogeneity is exactly what a latent profile approach is designed to detect, and it carries practical consequences. If eco-anxiety manifests as rumination in one person and as overwhelming emotion in another, a single standardized intervention may fit neither well.

To understand what predicted membership in the more severe profiles, the team used multinomial logistic regression, comparing each profile against a reference category while controlling for the other predictors. Two variables emerged as significant discriminators. Difficulties in emotion regulation, measured with a brief version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, substantially increased the likelihood of belonging to the most severe eco-anxiety profile. Intolerance of uncertainty, assessed with the short form of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale, played the same role. Individuals who struggle to accept ambiguous, uncontrollable situations and who lack effective strategies for managing emotional responses were significantly more likely to occupy the profiles where eco-anxiety reaches clinically relevant intensity.

Perhaps the most striking negative result concerned dark future perception, the generalized belief that the future holds predominantly negative outcomes. Despite its intuitive connection to climate dread, dark future perception did not significantly distinguish between the profiles. In other words, holding a bleak view of the future in general did not predict whether someone’s climate anxiety remained moderate or escalated into the most severe form. This finding challenges assumptions that eco-anxiety is simply an expression of a broader pessimistic time perspective, and instead points toward more proximate psychological mechanisms, namely emotional processing and uncertainty tolerance, as the levers that matter most.

The distribution of severity also carries a reassuring message. Eco-anxiety in this large sample was predominantly clustered at moderate levels, consistent with the Environmentally Concerned and Cognitively Preoccupied profiles together accounting for nearly two-thirds of participants. The levels most likely to compromise psychological functioning were concentrated in a limited subgroup, roughly one in five respondents when the Emotionally Distressed and Highly Eco-Anxious profiles are combined. This pattern echoes earlier international surveys, including the widely cited Lancet Planetary Health study of young people across ten countries, which found that climate distress is widespread but that impairment is concentrated among a smaller, identifiable fraction of the population.

The results align with a growing body of work on the psychology of climate distress. Prior research has linked emotion regulation difficulties to heightened eco-distress among psychotherapy outpatients, and studies of climate activists and students have found that regulatory strategies shape whether climate concern translates into constructive action or paralyzing distress. The intolerance of uncertainty construct, originally developed to explain generalized anxiety and later applied to pandemic-related distress, appears to function similarly here: when the threat is global, long-term, and impossible to predict with precision, people who cannot tolerate that ambiguity are pushed toward the anxious end of the spectrum. Theoretical models of climate anxiety and coping have anticipated exactly this structure, positioning appraisal and regulation as mediators between environmental threat and psychological outcome.

For clinicians and public health planners, the study argues for person-centered rather than one-size-fits-all interventions. Skills-based approaches that strengthen emotion regulation, such as those drawing on established frameworks from emotion science, may be particularly valuable for the profiles in which emotional distress dominates. For cognitively preoccupied individuals, techniques that address rumination and habitual worry may be more appropriate. The finding that intolerance of uncertainty distinguishes profile membership also suggests that interventions helping people accept and function amid environmental uncertainty, rather than attempting to eliminate it, could reduce the risk of eco-anxiety escalating. The authors note that their cross-sectional design cannot establish causal direction, and that the data, while broad, came from a single country and online recruitment. Even so, by mapping the hidden structure of climate anxiety in a large adult sample, the study offers a more precise vocabulary for a phenomenon that is rapidly becoming one of the defining mental health challenges of the climate era.

Subject of Research: Latent profiles of climate change anxiety and their psychological predictors

Article Title: Latent profiles of climate change anxiety: the roles of dark future perception, emotion regulation, and intolerance of uncertainty

Article References: Aslan, A. M., Koç, H., & Şi̇mşi̇r Gökalp, Z. (2026). Latent profiles of climate change anxiety: the roles of dark future perception, emotion regulation, and intolerance of uncertainty. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1540. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10089-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10089-6

Keywords: eco-anxiety, climate change anxiety, latent profile analysis, emotion regulation, intolerance of uncertainty, dark future perception, environmental psychology, mental health, Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale, Türkiye, psychological distress, person-centered analysis