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Updated: Aug 30, 2025

Social Isolation Model: A Noninvasive Rodent Model of Stress and Anxiety
Published on: November 11, 2022
A network approach to climate change anxiety and its key related features
Alexandre Heeren1, Camille Mouguiama-Daouda2, Richard J McNally3
1Psychological Science Research Institute, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; Institute of Neuroscience, UCLouvain, Brussels, Belgium; National Fund for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), Brussels, Belgium.
Abstract:
Research has pointed to startling worldwide rates of people reporting considerable anxiety vis-à-vis climate change. Yet, uncertainties remain regarding how climate anxiety's cognitive-emotional features and daily life functional impairments interact with one another and with climate change experience, pro-environmental behaviors, and general worry. In this study, we apply network analyses to examine the associations among these variables in an international community sample (n = 874). We computed two network models, a graphical Gaussian model to explore network structure, potential communities, and influential nodes, and a directed acyclic graph to examine the probabilistic dependencies among the variables. Both network models pointed to the cognitive-emotional features of climate anxiety as a potential hub bridging general worry, the experience of climate change, pro-environmental behaviors, and the functional impairments associated with climate anxiety. Our findings offer data-driven clues for the field's larger quest to establish the foundations of climate anxiety.
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