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Fear of Happiness and Devaluation of Positive Climate Information in Climate-Concerned Individuals
1Department of Psychology, The New School for Social Research.
Abstract:
Reward devaluation theory (RDT) describes the cognitive/affective process whereby people learn to interpret once-rewarding stimuli as threatening (Winer & Salem, 2016). RDT has advanced depression theory and science, but may also explain counterintuitive social phenomena, such as climate "doomerism" (Huber, 2020; Nightingale et al., 2020). The current experiment examined RDT in relation to climate values and beliefs. Participants were recruited in late 2022 from climate change-concerned social media groups. They completed a mixed-design experiment, with feedback to an imagined climate plan (positive, neutral) as the repeated measures independent variable, valence ratings regarding the feedback as dependent variables, and the RDT-related self-report measure fear of happiness (FHS) as the continuous between-subject variable. Results indicated the novel manipulation was successful. Critically, there was also a strong negative correlation between FHS and positive, but not neutral, condition ratings. These findings were predicted via RDT, and suggest that higher FHS predicts devaluation of positive information regarding the climate crisis--even among individuals likely to hold passionate climate beliefs. We thus present a novel manipulation that can be easily implemented to study cognitive/affective processes around climate change. We also demonstrate how tendencies to devalue reward can impact positive experience even within domains of passionate importance.
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