An Emotional Road to Sustainability: How Affective Science Can Support pro-Climate Action

Abstract

Although emotions play a crucial role in understanding and encouraging sustainable behavior and decision-making, many open questions currently remain unanswered. In this review, we advance three broad areas of particular theoretical and applied importance that affective science and emotion researchers could benefit from engaging with: (1) “sustainable emotions” or empirically testing the possibility of positive reinforcing feedback loops between anticipatory and experienced emotions following the adoption of sustainable behaviors, (2) “non-Western emotions” or exploring the extent to which people's understanding and experience of climate-relevant emotions differs across non-WEIRD populations, and (3) “impactful emotions” or the need to carefully differentiate the conceptual and empirical role of emotions in encouraging the adoption of low-impact (e.g., recycling) versus high-impact (e.g., flying less) environmental behaviors.