Disentangling the association between climate emotions and mental health outcomes

The mental health ramifications of climate change are the focus of a growing scientific literature. Several cross-sectional studies report that climate change can evoke various climate emotions (e.g., eco-anxiety, climate worry, eco-grief), which are associated with mental health difficulties. However, evidence is mixed regarding how different climate emotions relate to specific mental health indicators, and most existing studies rely on cross-sectional designs that cannot clarify the temporal sequencing of these associations. To address these gaps, we employed a dual-study approach investigating between- and within-person links between climate emotions and mental health difficulties. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study of 1136 undergraduate students (66.5% women, 32.4% men, 1.1% gender diverse) who reported on their climate change worry and mental health. Study 2 was a longitudinal study of 371 students (63.9% women, 34.5% men, 1.6% gender diverse) who completed measures of climate change worry, eco-anxiety, ecological grief, and mental health at three time points. Between-person associations linking climate emotions to anxiety and depressive symptoms were consistently observed across Study 1 and Study 2. Furthermore, in Study 2, we observed more complex within-person associations that varied depending on the climate emotions and mental health indicators. These findings advance our understanding of climate emotions by demonstrating not only that individuals exhibiting elevated generalized anxiety symptoms tend to report elevated eco-anxiety, but also that within-person fluctuations in eco-anxiety prospectively predict an increase in generalized anxiety over time, pointing to a possible cascading effect.