The research, published in Scientific Reports, examined three climate-related emotions that previous studies had identified as powerful motivators: anger, compassion and hope. Earlier work had shown that angry people are more likely to want to hold so-called climate criminals to account, that compassionate people are inclined to support victims of environmental damage, and that people who feel hopeful about solutions develop stronger intentions to act. Surveys consistently confirm these links. What surveys cannot easily confirm, however, is whether those intentions survive contact with reality, and that is precisely the gap the Norwegian and Polish team set out to close.

To do so, the researchers designed an experiment that went beyond the questionnaire. More than 2,000 participants in Norway and Poland were each given 200 Norwegian kroner or 20 Polish zloty, a modest but real sum of their own money. The participants were then exposed to a series of short stories crafted to trigger different climate-related emotions. Afterward, they were offered a concrete way to act on whatever they felt. They could donate their participation fee to charity, in this case the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), or they could work through a set of deliberately tedious pattern-finding sheets, with the experimenters donating on their behalf in proportion to the work completed. The second option, which the team calls a real impact task, is what distinguishes this study from most of the existing literature.

The results caught the researchers off guard. Very few participants, hardly any by the team’s own account, gave more money because of the emotional stories they had read, compared with people who had not been exposed to them. The difference in behavior between the emotional conditions and the control was negligible at best. Christian Klöckner, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Psychology who studies why people make environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices, admitted that the team was surprised. The emotional mechanisms that reliably predict stated intentions in surveys simply did not translate into changes in real, costly behavior when put to the test.

This disconnect matters because the field has accumulated a substantial body of evidence showing that emotions do shape attitudes. Klöckner notes that when people are angry, they report stronger motivation and intentions. When people feel a bad conscience, they are more willing to accept climate policies. And hope appears to be a precondition for any engagement at all, since people who believe nothing can be done tend to do nothing. None of that prior evidence is invalidated by the new findings. Instead, the study exposes a fissure between two layers of psychology: the layer where feelings form intentions, and the layer where intentions become behavior. The emotional stories shifted the first layer but left the second essentially untouched.

Klöckner’s earlier work hints that this fissure runs deep. In a separate large-scale project aimed at reducing household energy consumption, his team found that their interventions did in fact lower energy use, yet the participants’ psychological mindsets remained unchanged. The eventual energy savings, he explains, had very little to do with the individuals’ stated intention to save energy. Some people revise their intentions in response to emotional information, while those who make genuine, measurable changes, such as cutting electricity consumption, are not necessarily doing so for the reasons that survey research would predict. The practical lesson is that intention-based measures, the standard currency of environmental psychology, may be poor proxies for the outcomes that actually matter.

For conservation and environmental organizations, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. Non-profits depend heavily on financial contributions from supporters, and understanding what makes people start, stop or continue donating is central to their survival. WWF, which received the donations in this study, openly uses anger, compassion and hope in its fundraising, typically paired with a call to action. Denise Kohn, Senior Corporate Advisor for Partnerships at WWF in Norway, says the organization knows that its financial supporters donate for an average of five to six years, and that any new research shedding light on donor motivation is of genuine interest to the fundraising team.

Kohn also points out that climate itself has proven a difficult fundraising proposition. WWF has never been particularly successful in raising money on climate alone; nature remains a much stronger entry point for donors, and the current political and geopolitical circumstances mean that other crises frequently crowd climate out of public attention. In that sense, the NTNU and Warsaw findings do not simply tell campaigners that emotion fails. They suggest that the emotional architecture of climate engagement is more complicated than a single powerful feeling, and that organizations may need to look beyond one-off emotional appeals if they want to secure durable, behavior-level commitment from their audiences.

The research team is careful not to frame the results as a counsel of despair. Anger, compassion and hope still play vital roles in shaping how people understand climate change, and they likely remain necessary preconditions for engagement even if they are not sufficient on their own. What the study demonstrates is that the motivation behind actual change is more complex than any single overpowering emotion. To untangle that complexity, the team now intends to fund an even larger survey spanning ten countries, aiming to map the differences between people in the intricate patterns of emotional responses to climate change and how those patterns relate to real behavior.

For a field that has leaned heavily on the power of feeling, the message from this experiment is uncomfortable but clarifying. If the goal is to move people from concern to action, the path may run less through the heart than through the messy, contextual, and poorly understood machinery that converts private intention into public behavior. As Klöckner and his colleagues continue their cross-national work, communicators, campaigners and policymakers may need to treat emotional storytelling not as a lever that reliably moves behavior, but as one ingredient in a far more complicated recipe, one that this new line of research is only beginning to write down.

Subject of Research: The impact of anger, compassion and hope on pro-environmental behavior and climate action

Article Title: The negative effect of emotion in climate action

Article References: The negative effect of emotion in climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate action, emotion, anger, compassion, hope, pro-environmental behavior, donations, NTNU, University of Warsaw, climate psychology, behavioral research, WWF

The authors, O. S. Athira, K. Alphonsa Jose, and Neema Ann Philip of the School of Psychological Sciences at Christ University in Bangalore, are careful to frame their proposal as a heuristic rather than a settled theory. This distinction matters. A heuristic is a device for organizing questions and generating hypotheses; a theory, by contrast, claims to describe mechanisms that have already been demonstrated. The researchers argue that individual trauma frameworks—developed to explain what happens within a single person’s nervous system when confronted with overwhelming or inescapable threat—cannot simply be transplanted wholesale onto entire societies. Societies do not possess a nervous system, a unified psyche, or a diagnosable clinical disorder. What the heuristic borrows instead is a vocabulary: a way of describing the recurring pattern in which awareness of ecological threat coexists with affective distancing, avoidance of sustained engagement, and a diminished sense that individual or collective action can matter.

This pattern, the authors contend, is not captured by existing measurement tools. Instruments such as the Climate Change Anxiety Scale and the Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale index the intensity of climate-related worry and the degree of functional impairment it produces. They are designed to assess how distressed a person feels. Collective climate disengagement, as proposed in the Perspective, targets something different: the co-occurrence of registered concern with emotional numbing and reduced perceived efficacy. A person could score high on climate anxiety yet still be caught in the disengagement pattern, or conversely could show little overt anxiety while remaining affectively distanced from the issue. The construct also overlaps with, but is not identical to, climate denial, low climate efficacy, or political disengagement, which is precisely why the authors argue a new operational definition is needed.

The intellectual landscape the Perspective enters is already crowded with explanations for the gap between concern and action. Political polarization, material interests tied to fossil-fuel dependence, informational deficits, and low perceived efficacy all play documented roles, and the authors are explicit that these accounts remain indispensable. Psychological processes, they stress, should not be treated as substitutes for structural explanation; they form one interacting layer in what is fundamentally a multi-level conservation problem. What the trauma-informed heuristic adds is a candidate pathway through which chronic, diffuse, and difficult-to-control threat may narrow emotional processing and perceived agency at the population level—without displacing the structural and political drivers that shape who can act and who cannot.

The proposal also engages with a parallel sociological tradition. Earlier scholarship has catalogued psychological barriers to climate action, including limited cognition, ideological worldviews, and sunk-cost effects. Other researchers have argued that climate change constitutes a form of cultural trauma, with societies defending existing structures through social inertia at individual, institutional, and societal levels, drawing on concepts of habitus, field, and doxa. That account explains resistance to change as a property of social systems. The Bangalore team’s heuristic differs in both mechanism and aim: rather than offering a grand theoretical synthesis, it borrows individual-level threat-regulation and dissociation theory to generate a testable psychological pattern, oriented toward a concrete measurement and intervention agenda.

Central to the proposed model is the concept of overwhelm. Chronic ecological threat—amplified by structural conditions such as inequality, institutional failures, concentrated political power, and uneven access to meaningful action—is proposed to interact in ways that produce climate-related overwhelm. This overwhelm, in turn, is hypothesized to relate to the mediating pathway of affective distancing, avoidance, and reduced perceived efficacy, which ultimately feeds into reduced sustained engagement. Crucially, the model identifies moderators: social support, facilitated emotional processing, collective efficacy, and accessible action opportunities are proposed to weaken the link between overwhelm and disengagement. This is where the framework’s practical implications emerge, because each moderator is potentially amenable to intervention.

The authors draw selectively on Polyvagal Theory, which has been influential in clinical discussions of threat and emotional regulation. They acknowledge candidly that several of the theory’s evolutionary and neurophysiological claims remain scientifically debated, and they use it only as one interpretive vocabulary rather than as a settled explanation of climate-related behavior. Similarly, structural dissociation theory—which distinguishes ordinary day-to-day functioning from trauma-linked emotional material that remains difficult to integrate—supplies the analogy at the social level. Institutions, media, consumption routines, and everyday interaction continue running on schedule while grief, fear, guilt, and awareness of ecological loss receive little sustained collective processing. The patterned separation between knowledge, emotion, and action is what the authors find analytically useful, not any literal claim that a society dissociates.

Importantly, the heuristic predicts heterogeneity rather than uniformity. Climate engagement is shaped by culture, material security, local exposure to climate impacts, political power, Indigenous and local knowledge, historical responsibility for emissions, and access to collective infrastructures for action. A trauma-informed account, the authors argue, is strongest when it complements these determinants rather than individualizing them—when it explains why similarly informed people in different circumstances disengage differently, rather than locating the entire problem inside individual psychology.

The Perspective builds on newer work that reframes climate change itself as a source of collective trauma rather than merely a cause of individual distress. That literature has begun naming

Subject of Research: A trauma-informed heuristic for understanding collective psychological disengagement from climate change

Article Title: Thawing the climate freeze: a trauma-informed heuristic for collective climate disengagement

Article References: Athira, O. S., Jose, K. A., & Philip, N. A. (2026). Thawing the climate freeze: a trauma-informed heuristic for collective climate disengagement. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1983941. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1983941

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1983941

Keywords: climate change, climate psychology, collective trauma, ecological grief, climate anxiety, dissociation, climate communication, conservation science, climate inaction, climate cafés, collective efficacy, mental health

Eco-anxiety has moved rapidly from the margins of environmental psychology to the center of mainstream mental health research. Landmark surveys, including a global study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2021, found that climate anxiety was widespread among young people across ten countries and was linked to feelings of betrayal by governments that failed to act. Most of this research, however, has relied on quantitative scales and focused on younger, often urban and educated populations. The new study takes a different route. Rather than asking participants to score their worry on a questionnaire, the researchers sat down with twenty women and asked them to describe, in their own words, what living with climate change actually feels like.

The methodological approach was phenomenology-informed qualitative research, a design that aims to capture lived experience as it is subjectively understood rather than as it can be statistically summarized. Participants were recruited through criterion-based purposive sampling, meaning the researchers deliberately selected women who had direct experience of climate-related change, supplemented by snowball sampling in which early participants referred others. The group included women from both rural and urban settings, an important contrast because climate change intersects differently with rural livelihoods, which often depend directly on land and water, and urban life, where environmental change is mediated through infrastructure, prices, and news coverage. Semi-structured in-depth interviews allowed the women to steer the conversation toward what mattered most to them, while the researchers probed for depth and specificity.

The interview transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, the widely used six-phase approach developed by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, supported by the qualitative data analysis software MAXQDA 2025. Reflexive thematic analysis treats themes not as something waiting to be discovered in the data but as patterns actively constructed by the researcher through engagement with the material. This orientation matters for a topic like eco-anxiety, where the researchers’ own positioning inevitably shapes what is noticed and named. The analysis produced three interrelated themes within the broader domain of women’s lived experiences of eco-anxiety: the psychological effects of climate change, the gendered dimensions of eco-anxiety, and coping strategies that combine everyday action with a sober recognition of its limits.

The first theme, psychological effects of climate change, comprised five constituent codes: worry, uncertainty, emotional exhaustion, somatic burden, and reduced hope. The somatic dimension is particularly striking. For many participants, climate distress was not confined to the mind but manifested in the body, echoing a growing literature linking negative emotions about climate change to insomnia symptoms and broader mental health problems. A cross-sectional study spanning 25 countries, published in Current Psychology in 2023 by Charles Ogunbode and colleagues, found that negative climate emotions were associated with insomnia and poorer mental health across cultures. The new findings suggest that for women juggling multiple responsibilities, this bodily burden may be compounded by the sheer cognitive load of managing households under increasingly unpredictable conditions.

The second theme reveals what makes women’s eco-anxiety distinctive: it is woven into gendered responsibilities and everyday resource management. Participants described how climate-related distress was inseparable from caregiving roles, from securing food and water for their families, and from the invisible labor of anticipating shortages and planning around environmental disruption. This aligns with a substantial body of feminist scholarship on climate change. Researchers such as Margaret Alston, Sherilyn MacGregor, and Annica Kaijser and Anna Kronsell have long argued that climate vulnerability is not gender-neutral, and that intersectional analysis is essential to understanding who bears the costs of environmental change. Ecofeminist scholars, including Greta Gaard, have pushed this further, contending that the domination of nature and the subordination of women share common structural roots. The study’s findings give empirical texture to these theoretical claims, showing how abstract global processes land on specific shoulders.

The third theme, coping strategies, captures the tension at the heart of the study’s title, from anxiety to action. Women described practical responses to climate distress: everyday actions such as conserving resources, adjusting household routines, and making more deliberate consumption choices. Yet these actions coexisted with a clear-eyed recognition of their limits. Participants understood that recycling a bottle or shortening a shower cannot offset systemic forces, and this awareness itself became a source of frustration and, at times, paralysis. This tension mirrors findings across the quantitative literature. A 2023 meta-analytic review by Stanley, Wilson, and Milfont in the Journal of Environmental Psychology confirmed a positive association between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behavior, while other studies have documented how the same anxiety can produce eco-paralysis when self-efficacy is low. Anxiety, it seems, is a double-edged motivator.

The study’s most consequential argument may be its reframing of what eco-anxiety actually is. Rather than treating it as an individual pathology to be treated in the clinic, the authors contend that eco-anxiety is a socially situated and gendered experience, one that arises from material conditions, caregiving obligations, and perceived constraints on action. This position has real implications for mental health practice. If a woman’s climate distress stems from the impossible position of protecting her family with dwindling resources, individual therapy alone is an incomplete answer. The researchers argue instead that meaningful responses must operate at the community, institutional, and policy levels, addressing the structural conditions that generate and amplify the distress in the first place.

The study also contributes to debates about place-based distress, including the concept of solastalgia, coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2011 to describe the homesickness felt while still at home when one’s environment changes for the worse. By including both rural and urban women, the research demonstrates that climate-related emotional burden is not confined to those who watch their fields wither or their wells run dry. Urban participants, too, experienced climate change as an ambient threat, filtered through heat waves, water restrictions, and the affective atmospheres of a warming world, a concept developed by geographer Ben Anderson to describe how emotions accumulate in shared spaces.

The research was conducted with careful ethical safeguards. It received approval from the Non-Interventional Research Ethics Committee of Ege University Faculty of Medicine, and all participants provided informed consent before data collection, with permission for their anonymized accounts to be used in publication. The study originated as the first author’s master’s thesis at Ege University, completed in 2025, examining the effects of climate change on women from an ecofeminist perspective. The authors acknowledge the use of AI-based tools solely for translation and language editing, while retaining full responsibility for the scientific content. As climate change accelerates, the study stands as a reminder that the crisis is already inside homes and bodies, and that listening carefully to those who carry its daily weight may be the first step toward turning anxiety into collective action.

Subject of Research: Women's lived experiences of eco-anxiety and gendered climate distress

Article Title: From anxiety to action: women’s lived experiences of eco-anxiety in the context of climate change

Article References: Çakaloğlu, T., & Altay, S. U. (2026). From anxiety to action: women’s lived experiences of eco-anxiety in the context of climate change. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1497. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10059-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10059-y

Keywords: eco-anxiety, climate change, women, gendered vulnerability, mental health, qualitative research, thematic analysis, solastalgia, climate psychology, caregiving, environmental psychology, climate adaptation

The idea behind the experiment rests on embodied cognition, a framework in cognitive science holding that thinking is not confined to the brain but is grounded in bodily states and sensorimotor experiences. According to this view, abstract concepts borrow their structure from concrete physical experience. Temperature is one of the most studied grounding dimensions: physical warmth has been linked to social trust and interpersonal closeness, while cold has been associated with alertness, psychological distance, and threat sensitivity. Because climate change is an abstract, temporally distant risk, researchers have long suspected that bodily cues—especially cold sensations, which mirror the literal subject matter of global cooling fears and physical threat—might make the risk feel more immediate and concerning.

In the original 2012 experiments, Lewandowski, Ciarocco, and Gately asked participants to chew temperature-inducing gum as part of what they believed was a taste test. Cinnamon-flavored gum produced sensations of warmth, mint-flavored gum produced sensations of cold, and control participants chewed flavorless gum. Those who felt cold reported greater concern about climate change, greater willingness to volunteer for an environmental organization, and a larger intended time commitment than controls. The findings were arresting, but they arrived from a discipline now wrestling with a well-documented replication crisis, and embodied cognition research has been singled out as an area particularly vulnerable to failures of reproduction. Machery’s recent assessment of the field catalogues how many classic embodiment effects have failed to hold up under stricter experimental controls, making an independent test of the gum effect scientifically important rather than merely curious.

The replication team introduced three methodological improvements designed to address the most obvious weaknesses of the original work. First, rather than relying solely on undergraduates—the famously unrepresentative ‘WEIRD’ population of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies—they recruited a community sample alongside a student sample, allowing them to test whether the effect generalizes beyond young, highly educated participants. Second, they added a bubble-gum condition, a flavor that carries temperature associations for some people but is far weaker than mint or cinnamon, to separate the effect of chewing itself from the effect of temperature-inducing flavors. Third, and critically, experimenters were blinded to which gum each participant had received, since evidence shows that unblinded experimenters can inflate effect sizes by unconsciously influencing participants or their own data recording.

The procedure mirrored the original study closely. All gums were white, identical in shape, and stored in sealed containers, and participants were told they were taking part in a taste test. A total of 116 people took part: 58 undergraduates with a mean age of about 21, and 58 community members with a mean age of about 37, roughly 41 percent of whom held a university degree. Participants were equally divided across the three flavor conditions and, while chewing, completed a ten-item survey measuring climate change risk perception, concern for social issues in general, willingness to volunteer for a climate organization, and the perceived temperature of the gum. Only after the session ended did the experimenter identify the flavor using a hidden marker inside the container.

The manipulation worked. Sixty-one percent of participants who chewed cinnamon gum reported feeling heat, compared with just 5 percent in the mint condition and 21 percent in the bubble-gum condition, while 57 percent of the mint group reported sensations of cold against 5 percent of the cinnamon group and 15 percent of the bubble-gum group. Importantly, perceived and actual room temperatures did not differ across conditions, ruling out ambient temperature as an alternative explanation. The stage was thus set for a clean test of whether the induced temperature sensations moved climate attitudes.

The headline result partially replicated the original study. Participants who chewed mint gum reported significantly greater concern about climate change than those who chewed bubble gum, with a small overall effect size. The effect was driven entirely by the undergraduate sample, where it was moderately strong, whereas the community sample showed no reliable difference across conditions. In a further echo of the original findings, gum flavor had no effect on concern about unrelated social issues, supporting the specificity of the manipulation—it was climate concern, not general negativity, that shifted. On pro-environmental behavior, participants in the mint condition were more willing to volunteer for a climate organization, with 48 percent expressing willingness compared with 26 percent in the cinnamon condition and 24 percent in the bubble-gum condition, a pattern that held across both samples.

Yet the replication also revealed sharp limits. Unlike the original study, the sensation of cold did not increase the number of hours participants said they would volunteer, a result that remained non-significant even after sensitivity analyses excluding extreme outliers. The authors interpret this gap between intention and commitment through the lens of the well-known attitude–behavior gap in environmental psychology: concern about climate change is only weakly correlated with actual pro-environmental behavior, a relationship complicated by factors such as learned helplessness, perceived inefficacy of mitigation responses, education, and entrenched habits. Theoretical models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior and Value-Belief-Norm theory emphasize motivational and normative pathways from belief to action, and the findings suggest that a fleeting bodily sensation may nudge attitudes without activating the deeper mechanisms required for sustained behavioral commitment.

Why did the effect appear only in undergraduates? The authors point to research showing that younger people are more responsive to contextual climate cues, reflecting their developmental stage, active identity exploration, and heavy exposure to climate discourse in education and media. For students, climate change is a salient identity issue, so a cold sensation may more readily connect bodily threat cues with an already-primed mental representation of climate risk. Older community members, whose beliefs are more crystallized and shaped by diverse life experiences, appear far less susceptible. The result carries an important warning for the field: embodied interventions may work only for narrow populations, and generalizing effects from student samples to the public at large—as much of psychology has traditionally done—is a hazardous enterprise. The relatively small subgroup sizes in the new study also temper confidence, underscoring the need for larger and more diverse samples in future work.

The study did not control for confounds such as prior climate concern, political ideology, or environmental literacy, all of which are known to shape climate beliefs, and the authors flag this as a priority for follow-up research. Still, the broader lessons are clear. Embodied temperature effects on climate concern are real but fragile, cold-specific, and demographically bounded. The work reinforces growing skepticism about the robustness of classic embodiment findings while demonstrating exactly the kind of methodological rigor—community samples, neutral control conditions, and blinded experimenters—that can distinguish durable effects from artifacts. For anyone hoping that a stick of mint gum could substitute for climate communication, the message is sobering: bodily sensations may open a small window of concern, but converting that feeling into lasting engagement requires motivational and efficacy-building strategies that no flavor can deliver.

Subject of Research: The influence of embodied temperature sensations, induced by chewing gum flavor, on climate change beliefs and behavioral intentions.

Article Title: Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012)

Article References: Timmerbeil, H. M., Algarrafi, A., Lehrfeld, A., Murati, A., & Stöttinger, E. (2026). Climate change as a matter of taste? The influence of gum flavor and embodied cognition on climate change beliefs. Replicating Lewandowski, et al. (2012). Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1489. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10047-2

Keywords: embodied cognition, climate change beliefs, chewing gum, replication study, embodied temperature, environmental psychology, attitude-behavior gap, risk perception, Current Psychology, experimenter blinding, undergraduate sample, climate concern