Changing Climates: Integrating Psychological Perspectives on Climate Change (original) (raw)
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2019
Facing the facts of climate change and ecological crisis involves encountering powerful feelings such as loss, guilt, anxiety, shame and despair that can be difficult to bear. How we deal with these feelings shapes how we respond to the crisis and is critical in determining whether these responses are ultimately adaptive or maladaptive. Adaptive responses support psychological adjustment to the emerging new realities and stimulate appropriate and proportional action ). Maladaptive responses work against this in some way.
Psychology's contributions to understanding and addressing global climate change
American …, 2011
Global climate change poses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in this century. This article, which introduces the American Psychologist special issue on global climate change, follows from the report of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change. In this article, we place psychological dimensions of climate change within the broader context of human dimensions of climate change by addressing (a) human causes of, consequences of,
Climate Change: What Psychology Can Offer in Terms of Insights and Solutions
Current directions in psychological science, 2018
Can psychological science offer evidence-based solutions to climate change? Using insights and principles derived from the literature on social dilemmas and human cooperation, we discuss evidence in support of three solutions: crossing the borders of thought, time, and space. First, borders of thought could be crossed by using persuasion that is concrete and tailored to local circumstances and by highlighting information about people's efforts as evidence against the myth of self-interest. Second, borders of time could be crossed by using kinship cues, which can help make the future less distant, and relatively uninvolved advisors, who may help make the future salient. And third, borders of space could be crossed by showing group representatives how they might benefit from a frame of altruistic competition-focusing on the benefits of being seen as moral and global in orientation. Our overall conclusion is that psychological science can offer evidence-based solutions to climate c...
Psychology and Global Climate Change
PsycEXTRA Dataset
The article addresses the nature and challenge of adaptation in the context of global climate change. The complexity of 'climate change' as threat, environmental stressor, risk domain, and impacting processes with dramatic environmental and human consequences requires a synthesis of perspectives and models from diverse areas of psychology to adequately communicate and explain how a more psychological framing of the 'human dimensions of global environmental change' can greatly inform and enhance effective and collaborative climate change adaptation and mitigation policies and research. An integrative framework is provided which identifies and considers important mediating and moderating parameters and processes relating to climate change adaptation, with particular emphasis given to environmental stress and stress and coping perspectives. This psychological perspective on climate change adaptation highlights crucial but neglected aspects of adaptation in the climate change science arena. Of particular importance are intra-individual and social psychological adaptation processes which powerfully mediate public risk perceptions and understandings, effective coping responses and resilience, overt behavioral adjustment and change, and psychological and social impacts. This psychological window on climate change adaptation is arguably indispensable to genuinely multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and policy initiatives addressing the impacts of climate change.
Critical psychologies and climate change
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2021
This article is a review of recent contributions in critical psychology and its close cousins, critical social psychology, critical community psychology and liberation psychology, to understand human response to climate change. It contrasts critical psychology with mainstream psychology in general terms, before introducing a critical psychological perspective on climate change. Central to this perspective is a critique of the framing of individual behaviour change as the problem and solution to climate change in mainstream psychology and a related emphasis on identifying 'barriers' to proenvironmental behaviour. This framework is argued to be reductive, obscuring or downplaying the influence of a range of factors in shaping predominant responses to climate change to date, including social context, discourse, power and affect. Currently, critical psychologies set out to study the relative contribution of these factors to (in)action on climate change. A related concern is how the psychological and emotional impacts of climate change impact unevenly on communities and individuals, depending on place-based, economic, geographic and cultural differences, and give rise to experiences of injustice, inequality and disempowerment. Critical psychology does not assume these to be overriding or inevitable psychological and social responses, however. Critical psychologies also undertake research and inform interventions that highlight the role of collective understanding, activism, empowerment and resistance as the necessary foundations of a genuine shift towards sustainable societies.
How Can Psychology Contribute to Climate Change Governance? A Systematic Review
Sustainability
The urgency to reply to climate change requires a governance perspective that connects multiple societal levels and sectors and involves a plurality of actors. Psychologists should take an important role in addressing the ongoing climate crisis, together with other practitioners, scholars, policymakers and citizens. This systematic review aims to show the contribution psychology has offered in the governance of climate change, illustrating how psychological scholarship is positioned in the interdisciplinary discourse on climate governance and the way psychological constructs and theories are implemented. Following the PRISMA guidelines, two electronic databases (APA PsycInfo and Scopus) were screened, and 52 publications meeting the eligibility criteria were included and thoroughly analysed. The literature at the intersection between climate governance and governance is relatively scarce, yet it covers different domains and scales of analysis. Psychological contributions are always ...