Empirical evidence suggests that affective responses to climate change are predictive of pro-environmental attitudes, intentions, and behavior and may thus contribute to sustainability. However, that evidence is mostly correlational. We present experiments designed to test the mediational hypothesis that exposure to climate change information elicits negative affective responses, which in turn increase pro-environmental intentions. In Study series 1 (8 studies, total n = 819), we used a measurement-of-mediation design. We provided participants with information about the devastating effects of climate change or other non-threatening information. Neither providing that information nor the negative affective responses to that information were associated with participants' subsequent pro-environmental intentions. In Study 2 (n = 135), we employed a manipulation-of-mediator design, which was a more stringent test of mediation. We asked people to either intensify or suppress their feelings while they were exposed to information about climate change or information unrelated to climate change. Deepening one's feelings increased negative affect and reduced positive affect but did not significantly raise pro-environmental intentions. Together, these results suggest that climate change information reliably produces affective responses, but these do not translate into pro-environmental intentions in the short term.

Zusammenfassung: Die Zugehörigkeit zu sozialen Gruppen hilft Menschen besonders in Zeiten existenzieller und globaler Krisen. Sie unterstützt dabei, fundamentale Bedürfnisse zu befriedigen, Ziele in der Gemeinschaft zu verfolgen, Ängste zu reduzieren und wieder handlungsfähig zu werden. Der Artikel beschreibt drei gruppenbasierte Wege im Umgang mit existenziellen Bedrohungen: (1) Direkte Lösungsstrategien als aktive Versuche, die Bedrohung kollektiv in der Realität zu beseitigen. (2) Indirekte Strategien, bei denen bedrohte Bedürfnisse über die Gruppenzugehörigkeit erfüllt werden. (3) Palliative Strategien, bei denen Personen auf bedrohungsunabhängige Ziele und Ressourcen ausweichen. Der Rückbezug auf die eigene Gruppe verstärkt dabei das Denken in Gruppenkategorien, was häufig zur Verteidigung der eigenen Gruppenidentität und einer Polarisierung von Weltanschauungen führt. Wir diskutieren die motivational-affektive Funktion dieser Reaktionsweisen und zeigen, wie sie Menschen helfen können, Angst zu bewältigen und Handlungsfähigkeit zurückzugewinnen.

PurposeDark Triad (DT) leaders can have a detrimental impact on their environment. The present research explores whether DT leaders can even be perceived as a threat, inducing affective states of anxious inhibition and suppressing states of relaxation and determination, and whether such a threat could also trigger fascination-related affective states similar to previous research on threat and fascination. We further explore how both threat- and fascination-related affective states shape approach-avoidance motivation.Design/methodology/approachWithin two experimental manipulation studies (N1 = 137, N2 = 156), participants were exposed to a non-direct leader, giving them an opportunity to approach or avoid, who was described as either DT (experimental condition) or non-DT (control condition). In both conditions, the leader held the same level of power, had no opportunity to exert influence on the participant, and was explicitly portrayed as either reflecting only the negative aspects of DT, or depicted neutrally. Quantitative methods assessed perceptions of threat- and fascination-related affective states, and approach-avoidance motivations. An inductive qualitative analysis compared fascination-related responses across groups.FindingsDT leaders consistently elicited higher behavioral inhibition (BIS), lower BAS (behavioral approach), and more anger than non-DT leaders. DT leaders further amplified one form of fascination while dampening another. Qualitative data analyses revealed a dark fascination for the DT leader, such as wondering how far he will go. Regarding approach-avoidance motivation, participants were less motivated to approach the DT leader, while higher own DT traits moderated this dynamic towards higher approach.Practical implicationsAs DT leaders can be viewed as a threat, organisations should support their employees with threat- and stress-related reactions to protect well-being and psychological security. The complex affective responses towards the DT leaders further highlight that people's affective states should be taken into account in order to prevent harmful or toxic leader-follower dynamics.Originality/valueWhile the harmful effects of destructive leadership are well-documented, little is known about the threatening nature of DT leaders, triggering fear and defensive responses. In addition, fascination posits an additional danger to this dynamic, as it can normalise or glamorise harmful leadership, increasing tolerance of abuse.

ABSTRACT The pandemic changed people's lives and came with enormous restrictions on personal freedom, greatly restricting people's sense of agency. In response, people oscillated between fear and anger. We show ( N = 2125) the ways in which people restored their perceived agency that was taken away by restrictions and that affective reactions to the pandemic may have guided people's pandemic behavior. In Study 1 ( n = 276), psychological threat elicited by the pandemic predicted anxiety and was, in turn, related to reactance. While anxiety positively predicted reactions increasing the success of pandemic management, reactance was related to non‐facilitating reactions such as belief in conspiracies and vaccine distrust. In Study 2 ( n = 354), reading about a conspiracy myth as one form of defense increased positive affect. In Study 3 ( n = 213) and Study 4 ( n = 1282), we replicated findings from Study 1, extending the focus to belief in conspiracies and fake news, anti‐vaccination attitudes, national trust, solidarity, and mainstream media mistrust. Interestingly, in Study 4, defensive reactions were associated with more perceived agency, indicating that defensive reactions may be tools to manage pandemic‐induced affect. This study series shows that a threat and defense perspective may be a useful angle to understand human behavior in times of crisis.

Objectives Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. However, current policies are insufficient to keep climate change at manageable levels. In the United States, this is partly because attitudes and opinions on climate change have become increasingly divided along political party lines, making effective policymaking difficult. The existing literature has focused chiefly on cognitive (i.e., informational) approaches to increasing climate change awareness, which are often counterproductive due to patterns of biased information processing. We examined whether meditation can reduce affective polarization and the partisan divide on climate change. Method Using a preregistered survey experiment with 500 US respondents, we investigated whether a short (10-min) meditation practice would render partisans less polarized and more pro-environmental. Participants completed either a mindfulness meditation practice designed to cultivate awareness of thoughts and sensations, a loving-kindness meditation practice designed to cultivate unconditional love and compassion, or no meditation. Results Self-identified Republicans who completed the loving-kindness meditation subsequently reported significantly lower polarization scores compared to Republicans who did not meditate. Surprisingly, self-identified Democrats who completed the mindfulness meditation exhibited higher anthropocentrism than Democrats who did not meditate. This suggests that mindfulness meditation may, in some cases, reduce some aspects of pro-environmentalism. Conclusions Our results suggest that a short loving-kindness meditation can reduce polarization among Republicans. A form of mindfulness that cultivates awareness of thoughts and sensations but not interpersonal connectedness can have unintended side effects by fostering an anthropocentric worldview among Democrats. Preregistration This study was preregistered ( https://osf.io/nza78 ).

In the United States, conservative white men are demonstrably more skeptical about climate change than other adults, earning them the label "Cool Dudes." Cool Dudes who self-reported understand climate change very well (i.e., high subjective climate literacy) are particularly skeptical about it. We investigated the existence of a similar effect in Austria using a representative survey study (N = 2185). We measured and regressed climate change skepticism on participants' gender, age, education, political orientation, self-reported knowledge of climate change, and subjective climate literacy. We found no evidence of a Cool Dude-like pattern in Austria. Men were not significantly more climate-skeptical than women, regardless of their political orientation. Nevertheless, climate skeptics were older, more conservative, and less educated and more often stated that they were not well-informed about climate change. High subjective climate literacy was associated with higher skepticism about climate change among conservatives yet lower skepticism among liberals. High subjective climate literacy was also associated with higher skepticism among those not informed about climate change. These results underline the importance of political orientation, information seeking, and subjective climate literacy, but not gender, for predicting climate change skepticism in Austria.

We assume that the built space—as part of the physical environment—has the power to affect basic human need fulfillment. Accordingly, we investigated how design features of the built space within a physical environment contribute to this effect. In two studies, we used computer-aided design to manipulate the degree of privacy, clutter, and biophilia as well as color temperature of the environment in study spaces, then measured need fulfillment (total N = 314). In Study 1A, participants (N = 260) felt more inclined to enter private study environments than nonprivate ones and felt more competent, autonomous, and related to others in private environments. Some participants (n = 227) continued on to Study 1B, in which they preferred to enter warm, cluttered, biophilic environments and felt more competent, autonomous, and related to others in warm and cluttered environments. In Study 2 (N = 54), we investigated the effects in a virtual reality office setting. The participants indicated that they felt more competent, autonomous, and related to others in more cluttered environments than in empty ones. At the same time, they felt more related to others in biophilic environments compared to nonbiophilic environments. The findings provide the first evidence that the built environment affects need fulfillment.

The anxiety-to-approach model of threat and defense suggests that psychological threat and defense reflects the operation of the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioral approach system (BAS). Based on this model, we hypothesized that threat should lead to defense especially when both the BIS and the BAS are highly active. We tested this hypothesis in three experimental studies. In Studies 1 (n = 125) and 2 (n = 158), students were told that their performance in a task was below (vs. in the range of) that of university graduates to induce academic uncertainty (vs. certainty). Those participants who exhibited high anxious affect (indicative of BIS activation) and high approach-related affect (indicative of BAS activation) in response to the academic uncertainty treatment became more ethnocentric. In Study 3, we used the openly accessible ManyLabs 4 data set, a multilab attempt to reproduce a classic mortality salience study. Students (n = 795) were either led to reflect about their own mortality or about watching television. Again, those who experienced high levels of both anxious and approach-related affect responded unfavorably to the author of an essay that criticized their country. These results support the idea that anxiety and approach motivation promote the emergence of psychological defense.

Carbon pricing is a policy instrument for mitigating climate change. For such climate policies to be enforceable and effective, citizen support is crucial. We examined how values and political orientation relate to people’s acceptance of carbon pricing using Schwartz’s theory of basic human values and a representative online survey of 4,091 Austrian residents. The results showed that liberals were more in favor of carbon pricing than conservatives. This effect can partly be explained by the value of universalism (i.e., the value of the welfare of all people and nature) which is more important to liberals than to conservatives. However, presenting messages that emphasized the need for carbon pricing and were framed in accordance with values that fit participants’ political orientation did not influence how much people accepted carbon pricing. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggest directions for future research.

The general process model of threat and defense (Jonas et al., 2014) states that a common affective-motivational mechanism underlies threat-related solution strategies and threat-unrelated palliative responses to solvable and unsolvable (i.e., existential) threats. In a series of three studies (Ntotal = 683), we systematically tested the assumption that threat induces anxiety proximally (that is, immediately after a threat yet before a defense) and defense activates approach motivation distally (that is, after a defense has been implemented). We used an experimental design to manipulate both threat and defense and measured people's affective-motivational states following threat (proximal response) and following defense (distal response). We assessed people's proximal responses to unsolvable threats (mortality salience in Study 1; generalized uncontrollability in Study 2) and solvable threats (relationship conflict in Study 3). For the proximal threat response, the results showed that solvable and unsolvable threats activated feelings of anxiety proximally, mediated by increased need and expectancy discrepancies. A merged data analysis showed the predicted motivational function of defense following threat: Participants reported higher approach-related affect after engaging in resolution or palliation (but not after being distracted). Defensive engagement enhanced approach motivation only in the threat conditions. The findings support the notion that threat-unrelated palliation and threat-related resolution both reactivate approach motivation.

Psychological reactance is a motivational state that leads people to regain threatened or lost freedoms. It is accompanied by anger and negative cognitions and causes various effects such as resistance, aggression, and increased attractiveness of the original freedom. Despite a wealth of studies exploring the causes and consequences of reactance, there has been little effort to understand the phenomenon of reactance itself. To learn more about the state of reactance itself and to distinguish it from the related construct of anger, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked participants to read and imagine being in freedom-threatening, anger-arousing, and neutral scenarios. Using the Neurosynth image decoder, we discovered that, compared to the neutral and anger-arousing scenarios, the freedom-threatening scenarios produced a pattern of activation characteristic of imaging studies that feature terms such as theory of mind, mental states, and mentalizing. This suggests that when people are led to imagine experiences in which their freedom is restricted, they exhibit a pattern of brain activation that resembles activation patterns found in mentalizing studies, and this is not due to the affective consequence of reactance (i.e., anger).

Recent research suggests that mindfulness, compassion, and self-compassion relate to inner transformative qualities/capacities and intermediary factors that can support increased pro-environmental behavior and attitudes across individual, collective, organizational, and system levels. However, current insights focus on the individual level, are restricted to certain sustainability fields, and wider experimental evidence is scarce and contradictory. Our pilot study addresses this gap and tests the aforementioned proposition in the context of an intervention: an EU Climate Leadership Program for high-level decision-makers. The intervention was found to have significant effects on transformative qualities/capacities, intermediary factors, and pro-environmental behaviors and engagement across all levels. The picture is, however, more complex for pro-environmental attitudes. With due limitations (e.g., small sample size), this preliminary evidence confirms the feasibility and potential of mindfulness- and compassion-based interventions to foster inner-outer transformation for sustainability and climate action. Aspects that should be taken into account in larger confirmatory trials are discussed.

The present research investigates how emotional displays shape reactions to ingroup and outgroup members when people are reminded of death. We hypothesized that under mortality salience, emotions that signal social distance promote worldview defense (i.e., increased ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation), whereas emotions that signal affiliation promote affiliation need (i.e., reduced ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation). In three studies, participants viewed emotional displays of ingroup and/or outgroup members after a mortality salience or control manipulation. Results revealed that under mortality salience, anger increased ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation (Study 1), enhanced perceived overlap with the ingroup (Study 3), and increased positive facial behavior to ingroup displays-measured via the Facial Action Coding System (Studies 1 and 2) and electromyography of the zygomaticus major muscle (Study 3). In contrast, happiness decreased ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation (Study 2), and increased positive facial behavior towards outgroup members (Study 3). The findings suggest that, in times of threat, emotional displays can determine whether people move away from unfamiliar others or try to form as many friendly relations as possible.

Abstract The Dark Triad (DT; narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) has fascinated its audience in movies and theaters for decades. However, they also seem to evoke a sense of threat among people that interact with them. The present research hypothesizes that DT leaders are perceived as both threatening and fascinating. As fascination is approach-oriented while threat is avoidance-oriented, people facing a DT leader should be motivated to avoid and approach these leaders simultaneously, which could lead to a motivational conflict. In three studies (N1 = 255, N2 = 156, N3 = 138), we found that DT leaders evoked states of threat in the form of higher behavioral inhibition and lower behavioral activation. We further found that positive fascination emotions in terms of interest or curiosity were significantly higher in the control condition, while negative fascination emotions in terms of puzzlement or bafflement were substantially higher in the DT condition. The qualitative data gives additional insights into whata can be fascinating about a DT leader. Furthermore, the findings depict how both threat and fascination influence people's tendency for social proximity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

To successfully battle climate change, it is crucial to reach people across political camps and national borders. Research from dual-party systems indicates that climate change communication is most effective when it addresses how climate action promotes recipients' political values. Yet, to our knowledge, there is no such evidence from multi-party systems. To fill this gap, we conducted three studies in two Central European, German-speaking countries: Germany and Austria. In Study 1, we framed conservative and liberal climate protection messages using values from Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values. Liberals agreed more with the liberally framed than with the conservatively framed climate protection message. In Study 2, we framed the climate protection message based on moral foundations. Conservative participants agreed more with the conservatively framed climate protection message than with the liberally framed one. Study 3 integrated values from multiple frameworks, and ultimately conservatives as well as liberals agreed more to climate protection statements that touched on values reflecting their political ideology. Thus, empirical findings from dual-party systems hold for countries with more than two parties.

This paper presents the RST-AQ, a 22-item scale to measure the affective states related to the three motivational systems postulated by Reinforcement Sensitivity theory (RST-AQ): the Behavioral approach system (BAS), Behavioral inhibition system (BIS), and the Fight-Flight-Freeze system (FFFS). The three subscales are internally consistent. Results show an overall support for construct validity of our RST-AQ measure. The correlations of the RST-AQ subscales with other measures demonstrate a good convergent and divergent validity with regard to the subscales of BAS and BIS. The RTS-AQ Scale provides researcher with the first instrument to measures the affective states of the RST theory.

In this review, we analyse the Covid-19 pandemic in the light of the General Process Model of Threat and Defense (GPMTD; Jonas et al., 2014) and describe motivational and affective consequences resulting from the psychological threat elicited by the pandemic: Covid-19 did not only abruptly change everyday life, but also confronted people with existential questions. This led to the experience of discrepancies that people could not resolve, triggering an aversive state of anxious inhibition. People were motivated to overcome this anxiety using defensive behaviours that re-establish approach motivation. Such defensive behaviours include conspiratorial thinking and increased ingroup support. While describing the pandemic, we review evidence in favour and against the model to develop concrete suggestions to effectively promote non-destructive reactions to manage affective-motivational challenges resulting from the pandemic. In a final outlook, we conclude that the evidence generated may be used to analyse and react to future crises and their related psychological threats.

Across species, valence and motivational direction are inextricably linked (organisms usually approach good things and avoid bad things), and overriding these links is experienced as conflicting. However, not all negative emotions are linked to avoidance motivation. Therefore, positive conflict (avoiding positive stimuli) should produce conflict more reliably than negative conflict (approaching negative stimuli). In the present ERP study, we tested this assumption by contrasting positive and negative conflict. We presented participants with positive and negative words that they had to approach or avoid. Consistent with our proposition, positive conflict created stronger behavioral and neural effects than negative conflict; Positive conflict prolonged reaction times more than negative conflict did. Event-related potentials related to conflict (N450 and conflict slow potential) were only sensitive to positive conflict.