From eco-affective narrowing to agency: acceptance, externalization, and efficacy in climate-related cognition

Climate change is increasingly recognized not only as an environmental hazard but also as a condition that reorganizes perception, attention, future-oriented worry, moral appraisal, efficacy judgments, and decision-making. This conceptual analysis reframes eco-anxiety as a paradigmatic form of eco-affective cognition: a dynamic coupling of ecological threat salience, future simulation, responsibility appraisal, and efficacy appraisal under environmental uncertainty. The article develops the Acceptance-Externalization-Agency (AEA) model as a recursive, hypothesis-generating process framework specifying conditions under which eco-affective distress may become more or less action-enabling. The model is not proposed as a linear stage model, a validated clinical protocol, or a therapeutic promise that anxiety can be converted into action. Acceptance reduces secondary struggle against legitimate climate emotions; representational externalization converts diffuse, sometimes preverbal or embodied distress into observable, communicable, and revisable form; responsibility contextualization reduces over-individualized self-blame without dissolving personal, collective, or institutional responsibility; and agency emerges when action experience updates self-efficacy, collective efficacy, hope, and social identity. Selected therapeutic traditions are used not as competing treatments or efficacy claims, but as conceptual exemplars of attentional reorientation, symbolic distancing, embodied perspective shifting, and efficacy-linked action selection. The model clarifies testable transformation pathways for future research and psychological support while avoiding the pathologization, depoliticization, or individualization of realistic climate concern.