Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2025

Investigating the relationship between positive eco-emotions and pro-environmental responses

Résumé

To face the major challenges posed by environmental crises, it is necessary to make behavioral decisions beneficial for the environment – in other words, to adopt pro environmental behaviors. Among the factors influencing pro-environmental behavior, emotions linked to environmental crises, or eco-emotions, play a key role (Brosch et al., 2021). On the one hand, existing research points to the beneficial influence of certain negative eco-emotions on motivation to act pro-environmentally. However, on the other hand, the potential drawbacks of negative eco-emotions are beginning to be recognized (e.g., Gago et al., 2024; O’Neill & Nicholson-Cole, 2009). While negative emotions have been widely studied as unpleasant and sometimes harmful to mental health, this is less the case for positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2000). In this context, we carried out a cross-sectional study (N = 502) to explore the relationship between positive eco-emotions and pro-environmental responses. We found that positive eco-emotions were moderately to strongly associated with pro-environmental collective action intentions. Of course, we cannot infer causality from these data and conclude that positive eco-emotions impact pro-environmental responses. Therefore, we next wanted to see whether positive eco-emotions such as awe or compassion have an impact on a real pro-environmental behavior. However, to compensate for the lack of empirically validated experimental material for inducing positive eco-emotions, we undertook two studies to validate the procedure for inducing eco-compassion (N = 167) and awe of nature (N = 118). The results showed that we successfully induced eco-compassion in the video condition but not in the autobiographical recall condition. As for awe of nature, emotional induction was successful but this time in both emotional induction conditions. We now have experimental material for inducing two positive eco-emotions, enabling us to study their effects on pro-environmental behavior in a controlled way.

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Dates et versions

hal-05172147 , version 1 (21-07-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-05172147 , version 1

Citer

Ronan Bellemin, Aurelien Graton, Anna Tcherkassof. Investigating the relationship between positive eco-emotions and pro-environmental responses. Consortium of European Research on Emotion, Anna Tcherkassof & Martin Krippl, Jul 2025, Grenoble, France. ⟨hal-05172147⟩
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