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Identifying Types of Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Guilt, Eco-Grief, and Eco-Coping in a Climate-Sensitive Population: A Qualitative Study - PubMed

  • ️Sat Jan 01 2022

Identifying Types of Eco-Anxiety, Eco-Guilt, Eco-Grief, and Eco-Coping in a Climate-Sensitive Population: A Qualitative Study

Csilla Ágoston et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022.

Abstract

Background: Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century and it can affect mental health either directly through the experience of environmental traumas or indirectly through the experience of emotional distress and anxiety about the future. However, it is not clear what possible subtypes of the emerging "psychoterratic" syndromes such as eco-anxiety, eco-guilt, and eco-grief exist, how much distress they may cause, and to what extent they facilitate ecofriendly behavior.

Methods: We analyzed semi-structured interviews (N = 17) focusing on the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors related to climate change by using a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative methods.

Results and conclusions: The interviews revealed six eco-anxiety components, eight types of eco-guilt, and two types of eco-grief that help to understand the multifactorial nature of these phenomena. The six categories of coping strategies are in line with traditional coping models, and they are linked in various ways to pro-environmental behavior and the management of negative emotions. The results can help practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of emotions related to climate change and how to cope with them, and researchers to develop comprehensive measurement tools to assess these emotions.

Keywords: climate change; coping; eco-anxiety; eco-grief; eco-guilt; pro-environmental behavior.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they do not have any interests that could constitute a real, potential, or apparent conflict of interest with respect to their involvement in the publication. The authors also declare that they do not have any financial or other relations (e.g., directorship, consultancy, or speaker fees) with the companies, trade associations, unions, or groups that may gain or lose financially from the results or conclusions of the study. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

The relationship between the number of mentions of eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and eco-guilt and the various ways of coping in each interview. Note: The horizontal axis shows the data for the seventeen participants, in ascending order based on the number of “psychoterratic” symptoms, which is shown below each bar. The different colors (black, grey, white) of the bars indicate the different types of coping mechanisms. The vertical axis shows the number of the coping mechanisms mentioned by the participants.

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