Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages

The contemporary high-choice media landscape offers users considerable latitude to select media content. When it comes to media messaging about science issues like climate change, it is unclear whether audiences gravitate toward different kinds of emotionally evocative messages and what psychosocial factors underlie those preferences. Here, we presented young adults (N = 1,493) with three climate change videos to choose from (“funny,” “scary,” “informational”) and found more participants selected funny content than scary or informational. Contradicting hypotheses derived from mood management theory, negative mood was associated with selecting the scary video. Conservatives preferred the funny and scary video to the informational video, but gender identity was the strongest predictor of selective exposure with women preferring funny and scary videos to informational.</p

sj-docx-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221221110465 – Supplemental material for Culturally Relevant Frames Increase Individuals’ Motivation to Contribute to Carbon Emissions Offsets

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jcc-10.1177_00220221221110465 for Culturally Relevant Frames Increase Individuals’ Motivation to Contribute to Carbon Emissions Offsets by Ee Hwee Lau, Aneeta Rattan, Rainer Romero-Canyas and Krishna Savani in Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology</p

Bringing the Heat Home: Television Spots about Local Impacts Reduce Global Warming Denialism

Efforts to educate the general public about global warming and the potential policy solutions that could mitigate its effects have relied on the diffusion of facts. But, cognitive scientists have documented that psychologically distant events like global warming elicit less concern and motivation to act relative to immediate, proximal and certain events. This paper documents a quasi-experiment that tested the effect on attitudes of a television campaign that emphasized the temporally, geographically and socially proximal impacts of global warming on the ecosystems and business activity of a historically conservative area of the United States. The campaign aired on one cable provider. Subscribers of that and of competing providers in the same zip-codes were polled after the campaign. Respondents exposed to the campaign were more likely to believe that global warming is happening, to accept the scientific consensus, to be more concerned about impacts and more supportive of policy solutions.</p