Knowing what you feel matters: Emotion differentiation impacts climate-related attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors

The topic of climate change and humans' role in causing or addressing it often elicits a negative emotional response. Considerable literature supports associations between both general distress and specific negative emotions with climate-relevant outcomes. However, little is known about how individuals' tendency to differentiate specific climate change negative emotions from one another versus experience non-specific, broad negative distress may influence such associations. The current investigation examines Climate Change Distress (CCD) to assess whether specific climate change emotions of anger, anxiety, and sadness, can be distinguished from an overarching emotional distress construct in their associations with climate-relevant outcomes. We include data from the original open-source CCD investigation (N_Total =868). When negative emotions are sufficiently differentiated, they hold distinct influences on climate change experiences, engagement, and pro-environmental attitudes and behavior. Overarching emotional distress displayed the largest associations with responses to climate change (|β|s=.19-.62, ps<.001). However, decomposing distress into specific negative emotions independently accounts for smaller, yet significant, variance in key climate outcomes (|β|s=.15-.39, ps<.001). Additionally, higher climate change emotion differentiation of these specific emotions is associated with higher pro-environmental attitudes and actual behavior (|β|s=.10-.26, ps<.029). Greater climate anger that is more differentiated is associated with greater pro-environmental behavior (β=.13, p=.038). In contrast, greater anxiety accompanied by lower emotion differentiation was associated with greater pro-environmental behavior (β=-.18, p=.037). Sadness differentiation was not independently associated with included measures (|β|s<.11, ps>.164). Results suggest that climate change distress alone is not sufficient to understand individuals' climate-focused attitudes and behaviors. Specific emotions associated with climate change, as well as the clarity with which individuals identify them, play a role, sometimes prompting opposing behaviors that align with those emotions' motivational underpinnings. This knowledge can potentially be leveraged to appeal to those who may be differentially emotionally affected by climate change as both an acute and chronic threat.