Exploring climate change-related emotional experiences in Scottish students and the British public

Across three empirical projects, I aimed to develop a detailed understanding of how individuals in the UK experience climate change emotionally. I was particularly interested in climate anxiety as an emotion and the situational experiences that predict it, as well as understanding how university students experience and cope with the emotional impacts of climate change. In the first project, I developed and evaluated a novel situated measure for climate anxiety that captures individuals’ levels of climate anxiety for different relevant situations. I evaluated this measurement in a quantitative survey study with adults from the general UK public (N = 303). Results showed patterns for some situations that tended to be associated with higher climate anxiety across participants (e.g., “Hearing about climate catastrophes on the news”, “Thinking about the future that children in the current generation may experience”), while other situations tended to be associated with lower climate anxiety (e.g., “Visiting a loved place in nature”, “Seeing news on advances in green energy production”). There were also large differences between individuals in how much climate anxiety they experienced on average. Participants further showed intra-individual variability, meaning that the same individual typically reported low climate anxiety for some situations, moderate levels for others, and high climate anxiety for yet others. In the second project, I conducted a mixed-methods online survey study on University of Glasgow students (N = 869). I built on the first project and adapted the situated measure to a university student context by including situations particularly relevant to the life of students and young people (e.g., “Talking about the emotional impacts of climate change in class”, “Thinking about pursuing a career that is related to climate change”). I additionally assessed a number of other climate change emotions, climate change-related thoughts, and beliefs about the university’s climate actions to get a more holistic understanding of how students experienced climate change emotionally. Findings revealed that students experienced high levels of negative climate change-related emotions and thoughts, moderate but infrequent climate anxiety, and had mixed views of their university’s climate actions. Qualitative findings from open-ended questions further suggested that students would like to have more climate change-related teaching across subject areas and that they would like the university to pursue more sustainable investments. Findings suggested that this may even benefit students’ mental wellbeing by reducing anxiety. The third project was largely qualitative, and I analysed existing data from project 2 (N = 823) to investigate how students coped with climate change and the types of situations that required coping. I used conceptual content analysis to extract these types of triggering situations from participants’ open-ended text responses. I found four situation types that required students to cope, including navigating climate change information, climate justice issues, climatic changes and environmental losses, and climate change dismissal. I further applied the framework method to analyse how participants tended to cope with climate change. I found four overarching coping strategies: reducing the mental load of climate change, doing something constructive about climate change, seeking social support and meaning, and doomist thinking and behaviour. Taken together, these findings provide a much more nuanced understanding of climate anxiety and related emotions by showing their variability depending on the situation and the individual. Similarly, the types of triggering situations related to climate change that require active coping also seem to relate to a specific set of situational characteristics. The effects of these distressing emotions on university students’ mental health should be taken seriously, and universities may wish to investigate further the links between institutional climate actions and their students’ mental wellbeing.