Abstract
Recent studies suggest that eco-anxiety motivates pro-environmental behaviors. However, these studies are all cross-sectional in nature, and they frequently neglect possible important confounding variables (e.g., ecological identity). The present study was designed to deepen our understanding of the effect of eco-anxiety on pro-environmental behaviors by addressing the abovementioned limitations of recent research. The present study consisted of a 2-wave longitudinal study in which eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors as well as possible confounding variables (i.e., ecological identity and personality) were assessed among French adults. As hypothesized, individuals’ experience of eco-anxiety at t1 was positively and significantly related to individuals’ engagement in pro-environmental behaviors at t2. This significant positive relationship was observed even when ecological identity, the Big Five domains of personality, and pro-environmental behaviors at t1 were controlled for. It thus appeared that compared with individuals with low levels of eco-anxiety at a given time, individuals with higher levels of eco-anxiety at a given time displayed a greater likelihood of experiencing increases in their subsequent engagement in pro-environmental behaviors. The results are discussed in light of current knowledge about the function of anxiety.
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Data as well as study materials and R codes are publicly available (https://osf.io/mtdyh/?view_only=ae0cdcfd50194677bf476dc93a56d254).
Notes
Problem solving has different meanings in different research fields. In this article, we use the meaning of problem solving that is commonly used in emotion regulation and co** research: problem solving refers to performing concrete actions to modify the event that causes aversive emotions (Naragon-Gainey et al., 2017; Skinner et al., 2003).
Participants were asked to provide the same personal code at t1 and t2, and this code served to combine each participant’s responses to both waves.
The OSF files mentioned are available at https://osf.io/mtdyh/?view_only=ae0cdcfd50194677bf476dc93a56d254. In this study, responses to items of the Hogg Eco-Anxiety Scale were scored from 1 to 4 to make their comparison with the other questionnaires that we used easier. In addition, all alpha coefficients computed in this study consist of the alpha coefficients for ordinal variables proposed by Zumbo et al. (2007).
These correlations between eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behaviors remained positive even when ecological identity and the Big Five personality traits were partialled out (for t1: partial r = 0.26, p < 0.001; for t2: partial r = 0.41, p < 0.001).
Interestingly, if we perform this analysis for each item of the Pro-Environmental Behavior Scale (Markle, 2013), the item impacted the most by eco-anxiety at t1 (i.e., β = 0.19, p < 0.01) referred to a public behavior (i.e., How often do you talk to others about their environmental behavior?).
As described in Antoine et al. (2018) and Pavani et al. (2019), the type of graph chosen is useful for representing how the lagged version of a variable (e.g., pro-environmental behaviors at t1) and another variable (e.g., eco-anxiety at t1) exert an additive or interactive effect on the subsequent state of the former variable (e.g., pro-environmental behaviors at t2). In our graph, the individuals who increased their pro-environmental behaviors from t1 to t2 are above the diagonal.
We also analyzed whether change in eco-anxiety from t1 to t2 could explain pro-environmental behaviors at t2 more than eco-anxiety at t1. For this purpose, we computed the change in eco-anxiety from t1 to t2 in the form of a residualized change score, which we included among the predictors in our main analysis. We observed that although this variable significantly predicted pro-environmental behaviors at t2 (β = 0.13, p < 0.01), its predictive power was not stronger than the predictive power of eco-anxiety at t1 (β = 0.18, p < 0.001).
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Pavani, JB., Nicolas, L. & Bonetto, E. Eco-Anxiety motivates pro-environmental behaviors: a Two-Wave Longitudinal Study. Motiv Emot 47, 1062–1074 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10038-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-023-10038-x