Scientists Validate a Climate Emotions Scale in Wartime Ukraine

How do people feel about climate change when their country is at war? Psychologists in Ukraine have now answered a deceptively technical question with far-reaching implications: can a questionnaire designed to measure the full emotional spectrum of the climate crisis — from guilt and anxiety to hope and fascination — still work reliably for people living through invasion, displacement, and daily air raid sirens? A new study published in BMC Psychology by Iryna Kryazh and Vladyslav Baranov of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University provides a resounding yes, delivering the first validated Ukrainian version of the Inventory of Climate Emotions and demonstrating that its eight distinct emotional dimensions hold together with remarkable stability even across two data collection waves conducted during the ongoing war.

The Inventory of Climate Emotions, known in the literature as the ICE, is a multidimensional self-report instrument that distinguishes itself from narrower measures of climate distress. Rather than collapsing all climate-related feeling into a single index of anxiety or worry, the inventory maps nine to eight separate emotional response families — including anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contempt, hope, fascination and awe-related content — capturing the genuine complexity of how individuals relate to a changing planet. This granularity matters scientifically because different emotions predict different outcomes: guilt and anger often fuel pro-environmental activism, hope sustains engagement over time, and fear or sadness correlate more closely with psychological burden. A country lacking a validated version of such an instrument, the authors argue, is effectively locked out of both international comparisons and precise local research on the mental health consequences of environmental change.

The research team set out to translate and culturally adapt the measure for Ukrainian respondents, a process that requires far more than literal word-for-word conversion. Emotional terms do not map neatly across languages, and items describing, for example, guilt about consumption or awe at nature must resonate with the lived experience of the target population. The researchers then administered the adapted Ukrainian version, designated the ICE-UA, together with a battery of other validated psychological measures to 673 Ukrainian adults recruited through an online survey. The sample had a mean age of 36.13 years with a standard deviation of 11.37, and women made up 67.2 percent of respondents. Alongside the climate emotion items, participants completed instruments assessing eco-anxiety, environmental attitudes and behavior, depressive symptoms, and subjective well-being, allowing the team to test whether the new scale behaved the way theory says it should.

The statistical centerpiece of the study was confirmatory factor analysis, a technique that tests whether the pattern of relationships among questionnaire items matches a predefined structure — in this case, the eight-factor architecture of the original inventory. The results were strong: the comparative fit index reached 0.947 and the Tucker-Lewis index 0.939, both comfortably above conventional thresholds, while the root mean square error of approximation stood at 0.079 and the standardized root mean square residual at 0.057, values that fall within acceptable bounds for psychological measurement models. Internal consistency, assessed with McDonald’s omega, ranged from 0.786 to 0.912 across the eight subscales, indicating that the items within each emotional dimension cohere tightly enough to yield dependable scores.

Perhaps the most technically ambitious component was the analysis of measurement invariance, the property that determines whether a scale measures the same underlying constructs in the same way across different groups. Using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis, the researchers compared configural, metric, and scalar levels of invariance across gender, age groups, displacement status, and — strikingly — across two independent data collection waves conducted in 2024 and 2025. Full measurement invariance was established in every comparison, meaning that a given score on, say, the fear or hope subscale carries the same psychological meaning for a displaced respondent as for someone who stayed home, for a woman as for a man, and for someone surveyed in the third year of the full-scale invasion as for someone surveyed in the fourth.

This wartime setting is what elevates the study from routine psychometrics to something genuinely novel. Climate emotion research typically proceeds in relatively stable societies, where the dominant stressors are economic or political. Ukrainian respondents completed the ICE-UA while managing the chronic stress of armed conflict, a context that plausibly competes with or reorganizes environmental concerns. That the eight-factor structure not only survived but proved fully comparable across independent wartime samples collected a year apart suggests the underlying emotional architecture of climate response is robust to extraordinary contextual strain. The authors note that this comparability across waves provides further structural support for the inventory itself, beyond its specific Ukrainian application.

Nomological validity — the demonstration that a measure relates to other constructs in theoretically expected ways — was examined using Spearman’s rank correlations, a non-parametric approach appropriate for the response distributions involved, with Benjamini-Hochberg correction applied to control the false discovery rate. Climate emotions on the ICE-UA showed significant associations with eco-anxiety as measured by the Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale, with environmental attitudes and pro-environmental behavior, with depressive symptoms, and with subjective well-being as captured by the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. These relationships followed the expected directional pattern, reinforcing the interpretation that the scale taps genuine affective dispositions rather than statistical artifacts, and confirming its usefulness for studies linking climate affect to mental health and environmental action.

Group differences emerged that echo patterns seen in prior international research. Women scored higher than men on most of the emotion subscales, a finding consistent with broader evidence that women on average report more intense emotional responses to climate change. Men, by contrast, scored higher on the contempt dimension, an intriguing result given that contempt toward climate discourse or climate actors is among the least studied emotions in the environmental psychology repertoire. Multiple linear regression was used to test these differences while accounting for age, study wave, and displacement status, and the fact that such differences were detectable at all is itself evidence of the scale’s sensitivity: a poorly performing instrument would show floor effects or noise rather than orderly, theory-consistent demographic contrasts.

For researchers and clinicians, the practical consequences are immediate. Ukrainian-speaking populations can now be assessed with a multidimensional climate emotion instrument whose scores are comparable across gender, age, displacement, and time — a property that opens the door to longitudinal studies tracking how climate feelings evolve as the war continues and as environmental pressures accumulate. The validated ICE-UA also enables cross-cultural research comparing Ukraine with the growing family of countries where the inventory has been adapted, testing whether the emotional geography of the climate crisis is universal or shaped by national circumstance. The study, ethically approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki, received no external funding, and the authors report no competing interests. As climate change intensifies and as psychological research increasingly treats emotional response as a key driver of both environmental behavior and mental health, the Ukrainian validation stands as evidence that even a society under bombardment can contribute rigorous, internationally comparable data on how humanity feels about a warming world.

Subject of Research: Psychometric validation of a multidimensional climate emotion scale in Ukraine during wartime

Article Title: The Ukrainian validation of the Inventory of Climate Emotions: measurement invariance and nomological relationships in a wartime context

Article References: The Ukrainian validation of the Inventory of Climate Emotions: measurement invariance and nomological relationships in a wartime context. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05661-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05661-5

Keywords: climate emotions, psychometrics, Ukraine, measurement invariance, eco-anxiety, scale validation, mental health, pro-environmental behavior, confirmatory factor analysis, wartime psychology, Ukrainian, validation