Research and resources, shaped by those doing the work

A young person reflects on a counselling session where their climate anxiety was addressed in an unexpected way, prompting a rethink of assumptions about how society understands climate anxiety.

ABSTRACT (Open access): The discipline of clinical psychology is waking up to the climate crisis. There is growing consensus that the mental and physical health impacts of climate and ecological change will be significant, and will compound existing health and social inequalities. Whilst many UK clinical psychologists recognise climate change as professionally relevant, there is no literature documenting their level of awareness about the threats of climate change to psychological wellbeing. Interviews were conducted with 13 clinical psychologists working in the NHS; narrative analysis revealed identity dilemmas and social narratives about the profession influencing whether and how clinical psychologists adopted a climate-concerned position in their professional lives.

Drawing on habit theory, this paper investigates habitual worry about global warming as a form of 'eco-anxiety', asking whether such worrying is constructive - a motivated pro-environmental response - or unconstructive, functioning more like a symptom of pathological worry. Across three studies, the authors find that global warming worry, when controlled for other worry sources such as personal issues and the economy, is not significantly associated with pathological worry, and instead correlates with markers of constructiveness including a 'green' self-identity and other determinants of pro-environmental behaviour. The habitual quality of the worry - its enduring, repetitive, automatic nature - is argued to be what gives it power to shape behaviour, whether toward constructive engagement or, potentially, toward paralysis, offering an empirically grounded case for taking eco-anxiety seriously as a largely adaptive rather than purely pathological response.

ABSTRACT (CC BY 4.0): Recent research suggests that engagement in environmentally-friendly behavior can feel good. Current explanations for such a link do not focus on the nature of environmentally-friendly behavior itself, but rather propose well-being is more or less a side-benefit. We propose that the moral nature of environmentally-friendly behavior itself may elicit positive emotions as well, because engaging in this behavior can signal one is an environmentally-friendly and thus a good person. Our results show that engagement in environmentally-friendly behavior can indeed affect how people see themselves, and the more environmentally-friendly and positive people saw themselves, the better they felt about acting environmentally-friendly.

This study investigates why people report that acting sustainably feels good, despite such actions often requiring more effort or inconvenience than less sustainable alternatives. Testing whether the positive emotions associated with sustainable behaviour depend on how voluntary the action feels, the authors find that people report feeling more positive about sustainable actions when they have personally chosen to engage in them, and more negative about unsustainable actions chosen freely - suggesting that a sense of personal agency, rather than the environmental outcome alone, contributes to the positive emotional experience of green behaviour.

ABSTRACT: This study explored how a process of community transformation emerged in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. Most post-disaster research focuses on community and personal losses while little is known about strengths and positive outcomes. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, vast structural injustices in Puerto Rico were made visible. In this grounded theory study, residents from different communities in Puerto Rico (N=69) shared their post-disaster experiences. Results revealed a phase-based theoretical model of post-disaster community transformation, with facilitators including a sense of community, posttraumatic growth, and critical consciousness, and barriers including leader burnout and interpersonal tensions.