Introduction: As emotions are strong predictors of climate policy support, we examined multiple discrete emotions that people experience in reaction to various types of information about climate change: its causes, the scientific consensus, its impacts, and solutions. Specifically, we assessed the relationships between four types of messages and five discrete emotions (guilt, anger, hope, fear, and sadness), testing whether these emotions mediate the impacts of information on support for climate policy. Methods: An online experiment exposed participants (N = 3,023) to one of four informational messages, assessing participants' emotional reactions to the message and their support for climate change mitigation policies as compared to a no-message control group. Results: Each message, except the consensus message, enhanced the feeling of one or more emotions, and all of the emotions, except guilt, were positively associated with policy support. Two of the messages had positive indirect effects on policy support: the impacts message increased sadness, which in turn increased policy support, and the solutions message increased hope, which increased policy support. However, the solutions message also reduced every emotion except hope, while the impacts, causes, and consensus messages each suppressed hope. Discussion: These findings indicate that climate information influences multiple emotions simultaneously and that the aroused emotions may conflict with one another in terms of fostering support for climate change mitigation policies. To avoid simultaneously arousing a positive motivator while depressing another, message designers should focus on developing content that engages audiences across multiple emotional fronts.

When it comes to reducing obesity, evidence shows that changing food environments is more effective than measures that try to educate or change the behaviour of individuals. The interventions that participants consider to be most acceptable are the same as those that they perceived to be most effective at tackling obesity. However, the interventions that were reported to be least effective and least acceptable — such as reducing portion sizes and the taxation of unhealthy foods — may actually have the greatest potential for promoting healthy eating at the population level. While we must be cautious with how we interpret correlations like this, it suggests that addressing the disconnect between the evidence base and public understanding may be a viable way of influencing public acceptability

In the middle of a winter’s night in 2017, Frank Luntz’s cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles. Luntz — who specializes in how the public reacts to words — saw scary evidence of a threat that he once tried to neutralize with language. In 2001, he’d written a memo of environmental talking points for Republican politicians and instructed them to scrub their vocabulary of “global warming,” because it had “catastrophic connotations,” and rely on another term: “climate change,” which suggested “a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Last month, with a revised script, Luntz appeared before the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis. “I’m here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001,” Luntz said. Nearby was a colorful chart of vocabulary, developed since his polling in 2009 showed bipartisan support for climate legislation. He went on: “I’ve changed. And I will help you with messaging, if you wish to have it.”

Addressing massive challenges like climate change and poverty requires that we take a long-term view and have a preventative mindset. Since these perspectives challenge the deeply ingrained ways we have evolved to think and behave, we need to pay attention to why prevention is hard to think about and navigate the cognitive road blocks that stand in the way of progress. By presenting issues and information in ways that unlock support for preventative approaches, we can galvanize the ideas and actions social and environmental change requires.

Given the central role of anger in shaping adversarial policy preferences in the context of intergroup conflict, its reduction may promote conflict resolution. In the current work, we drew on psycholinguistic research on the role of language in generating emotions to explore a novel, extremely subtle means of intervention. Specifically, we hypothesized that phrasing conflict-relevant policies in noun form (vs. verb form) would reduce anger and impact policy support correspondingly. Results across three experimental studies in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict supported these expectations for both support for concessions (Studies 1–3) and retaliatory policies (Study 3), with reduction in anger mediating the salutary impact of noun form (vs. verb form) on policy support. These results expand our understanding of the influence of language on emotions and policies in the context of conflict and have applied relevance for conflict-resolution efforts. (1) (PDF) A Rose by Any Other Name? A Subtle Linguistic Cue Impacts Anger and Corresponding Policy Support in Intractable Conflict. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322150387_A_Rose_by_Any_Other_Name_A_Subtle_Linguistic_Cue_Impacts_Anger_and_Corresponding_Policy_Support_in_Intractable_Conflict [accessed May 02 2019].

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