Keeping cool in the heat: Emotion regulation in response to climate change

DOI

Climate change is a global crisis that evokes strong emotions. However, it is unclear which strategies people adopt to regulate these emotions, and how these strategies predict affective well-being and pro-environmental engagement. The aim of the present study was to get a better understanding of usage and effectiveness of a broad set of emotion regulation strategies in the context of climate change. At wave 1 (N = 325 participants), we assessed emotion regulation, affective well-being, past pro-environmental behavior and future pro-environmental behavioral intentions. Four weeks later, at wave 2 (N = 137 participants), pro-environmental behavior was again assessed. Other-blame was the most often used regulation strategy in the context of climate change. Rumination and self-blame were found to involve a key tradeoff as usage of these strategies was associated with higher pro-environmental engagement but lower affective well-being. In contrast, seeking social support was positively related to both pro-environmental engagement and affective well-being. These results demonstrate the importance of simultaneously examining well-being outcomes and behavioral outcomes in emotion regulation research in the context of climate change.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/SU9DM1
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2025.102864
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/SU9DM1
Provenance
Creator Alabak, Merve ORCID logo; Verduyn, Philippe ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor faculty data manager FPN; Verduyn, Philippe; Alabak, Merve
Publication Year 2025
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University); Verduyn, Philippe (Maastricht University); Alabak, Merve (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type survey data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 69790
Version 2.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences