Commentary: Climate change worry among adolescents—on the importance of going beyond the constructive–unconstructive dichotomy to explore coping efforts—a commentary on Sciberras and Fernando (2021)

Climate change worry and eco-anxiety are concepts that have become increasingly discussed both in opinion pieces in a scientific context and in popular debate. Empirical research about this topic is scarce, however, and this is particularly true for studies involving young people. It could be argued that, within this group, it is especially important to investigate the relationships between climate change worry/anxiety, on the one hand, and general well-being and climate change engagement, on the other. For a long time, psychologists have argued that children and adolescents can be particularly vulnerable to stress and poor mental well-being caused by climate change, and that this could be true even for those who have not suffered climate change-related catastrophes directly, but have primarily encountered climate change information through media or school (Sanson, Van Hoorn, & Burke, 2019). We also know that young people dominate the global protest movement demanding that politicians and other global leaders take the climate threat seriously and act in a forceful manner.

It is therefore excellent that Sciberras and Fernando focus on the important but understudied topic about young people and climate change worry (Sciberras & Fernando, 2021). In a unique 8-year longitudinal study, they investigate trajectories of climate change worry throughout adolescence and associations with measures of depression and engagement with news and politics in late adolescence. One main finding is that adolescents with high levels of climate worry that are persistent over time had higher rates of depressive symptoms in late adolescence compared to a group that was moderately worried about climate change, while adolescents with increasing climate change worry did not. This indicates that increased climate change worry does not drive general depressive symptoms. It is also important to note that what the authors capture is just a higher mean compared to another group on a self-report measure of depressive symptoms, not depression in a clinical sense. Sciberras and Fernando also found that a high level of climate change worry, both persistent and increasing patterns of worry, was positively related to engagement with news and politics over time. Their conclusion is that climate change worry is foremost a constructive response to a serious problem. However, they also acknowledge that for some groups, this kind of worry can be less constructive and that there is a risk that if global leaders do not take this problem seriously enough and delay actions, young people’s worry could lead to greater hopelessness and low levels of well-being. Importantly, Sciberras and Fernando discuss that if many young people worry about climate change, which is the case in their targeted group of young Australians, psychologists and therapists will most probably meet young people who are very concerned about climate change in their practice. However, this does not necessarily imply that climate change worry has caused their mental health problems, but this emotion could potentially exacerbate their difficulties.

In this commentary, I hope to complement Sciberras and Fernando’s (2021) important work by summarizing some aspects of research related to climate change worry. I will primarily focus on the question that Sciberras and Fernando begin with, that is, whether climate change worry is a constructive or an unconstructive psychological phenomenon. This question is also common in the popular press and among climate change researchers debating climate change worry and eco-anxiety on social media platforms like Twitter. Some cross-sectional studies have investigated this issue, mostly in groups of adults, and arrived at very diverse results regarding relationships to mental health and subjective well-being. Sometimes, worry is associated with poor well-being, or more specifically this usually applies only to general negative affect, and sometimes there are no associations between worry and well-being (Ojala, Cunsolo, Ogunbode, & Middleton, 2021).

Sciberras and Fernando (2021) take an important step in shedding new light on this topic by conducting a longitudinal study, but the diverse relationships between climate worry and well-being found in earlier cross-sectional studies indicate that it would be good to go beyond the dichotomy of whether worry is constructive or unconstructive and to also explore how young people cope with climate change worry. Emotions are never pure; as soon as we feel an emotion, we do something with it; we cope with or regulate the initial emotional reactions (Clarke, 2006; Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000). Often, these ways of dealing with emotions are more important than the emotions themselves in explaining well-being and engagement. By including different coping strategies that young people use to deal with climate change, questions about when worry is constructive or unconstructive seen from a well-being and engagement perspective can be answered in a better way, or even be left aside.

Young people are not passive victims of their climate change worry but actively cope in different ways (Ojala, 2012; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019). Although they are not a large group, some young people de-emphasize the seriousness of climate change by arguing, for example, that climate change is exaggerated by media and researchers (Ojala, 2012). This group is not worried about climate change and is less inclined to be active. Sciberras and Fernando (2021) also found a group of young people in their sample of Australian youths who do not seem to be concerned about climate change. De-emphasizing the climate threat could be traced to the fact that some people feel threatened by the societal changes that adapting to the reality of climate change would imply, and, to avoid feeling negative emotions, they proactively cope by de-emphasizing the threat in different ways (Cameron & Payne, 2011). Alternatively, as Sciberras and Fernando speculate, based on my own work (Ojala, 2015), this could also be a way to feel hopeful. Thus, one could argue that some young people who do not worry about climate change are coping in less constructive ways, at least as seen from an engagement perspective.1 However, this needs to be corroborated in future research.

Young people also use more constructive coping strategies like problem-focused coping and meaning-focused coping. When using problem-focused coping, people try to do something about the problem/stressor at hand, thereby also indirectly regulating their worry. Young people can talk with their friends about what to do about the climate threat or read a book about what children can do (Ojala, 2012). Problem-focused coping is positively associated with a sense that one can influence the climate problem and with climate engagement. However, in two studies, problem-focused coping was also related to a higher degree of general affect, one aspect of subjective well-being (Ojala et al., 2021). This relationship was explained by the fact that these young people also worried more about climate change. Thus, the relationship that Sciberras and Fernando (2021) found between different patterns of high levels of worry and engagement can also be mediated by problem-focused coping; at the same time, problem-focused coping perhaps can also be a mechanism involved in increased worry. Using individualized problem-focused coping concerning a threat that you do not have full control over could become too burdensome and lead to increased stress (Clarke, 2006).

Therefore, one could ask if there are any ways of coping that are related to both subjective well-being and climate change engagement. Meaning-focused coping is a concept created by Folkman and colleagues and is primarily about promoting positive feelings such as hope (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000). In theory, positive emotions can reside side by side with a rational2 worry buffering this worry from turning into low well-being and also helping people to cope in a problem-focused way that increases engagement (Folkman & Moskowitz, 2000).

Research on meaning-focused coping with climate change supports these theoretical claims since this way of coping is positively associated with all aspects of subjective well-being, as well as related to climate engagement and a high degree of self-efficacy (Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019; Ojala et al., 2021). Furthermore, this way of coping seems to buffer children who use a high degree of problem-focused coping from also feeling general negative affect. Meaning-focused coping in this context consists of having trust in different societal actors, defiant hope, and being able to switch perspectives between negative aspects of climate change and positive aspects, such as progress made (Ojala, 2012). To capture meaning-focused coping in future longitudinal studies would therefore be very interesting.

One related study used a person-centered approach and found different patterns of high levels of worry about global environmental problems (including climate change) and subjective well-being, where one group scored low on well-being and one scored high (Ojala, 2005). The adolescents who worried a great deal but still experienced a high degree of subjective well-being also scored significantly higher on hope, meaningfulness, trust in environmental organizations, and anger, compared to highly worried adolescents who scored low on well-being. Thus, a general sense of meaning could also be a constructive way of coping with climate change. In addition, hope also seems to work in this way. However, Sciberras and Fernando (2021) only discuss climate hope as something that is used to deny the seriousness of the climate threat and that impedes engagement. But hope, just like worry, cannot only be seen as a pure emotion but also includes cognition (Snyder, Rand, & Sigmon, 2001). Research has found that indeed one kind of climate hope is based on denial of the climate threat and is not constructive from an engagement perspective (Ojala, 2015). However, climate hope based on problem-focused coping and meaning-focused coping is positively related to pro-environmental behaviors even when controlling for other more well-known predictors of these kinds of behaviors, like gender and social influence.

To summarize, the study by Sciberras and Fernando (2021) is a very important contribution to the rather new research field of climate change psychology. Future studies could benefit from taking account of coping with climate change worry in a longitudinal context, and, besides investigating separate coping strategies, it could also be rewarding to look at patterns of coping. To use person-oriented approaches, as Sciberras and Fernando have done in their study, is highly recommended. However, there is also a need to start with qualitative approaches to capture coping with climate change in diverse cultural contexts before conducting quantitative studies. Coping could differ from one cultural context to another. This growing research field about climate worry is indeed of interest to mental health professionals but perhaps more so in a nonclinical context where teachers, parents, and young people can gain insights insight into how climate worry manifests itself. This knowledge could help in the effort to turn climate worry into a productive motivational force for young people to take part in the huge societal sustainability transformation process that lies before us.

Acknowledgements

The author has declared that she has no competing or potential conflicts of interest.

Ethical information

No ethical approval was required for this commentary.

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