Emotion in Strategic Environmental Communication Research: Challenges and Opportunities

Widespread systemic and individual action is needed to address major environmental problems and transition to a healthier, more sustainable future (IPCC, 2021). Communication is an essential component to educating and motivating people to take action. A deep literature shows the important role of emotion in persuasion, decision-making, and human behavior (Slovic & Peters, 2006). There are many insightful studies that examine the role of emotion in environmental communication and public opinion, such as whether emotion makes messaging more persuasive (e.g., Gustafson et al., 2020; Wong-Parodi & Feygina, 2021) or whether emotion predicts people's support for climate policy (e.g., Goldberg et al., 2021; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014). However, there is still much to learn about how emotions shape selection, attention, processing, and effects of environmental communication (Brosch & Steg, 2021). Here, I highlight areas in which the affective sciences can make important contributions to our understanding of environmental communication, and how research on environmental communication can contribute to the affective sciences.

First, it is important to note that I am taking a strategic communication perspective in this article. That is, the challenges and opportunities I highlight take the perspective of entities (e.g., organizations, governments, educators, public communicators; Zerfass et al., 2018) that have specific outcomes in mind: maximizing the impact of environmental communication toward achieving specific goals. To do this, interested entities have to make decisions under uncertainty about which interventions to deploy, how to deploy them, and which situational and strategic tradeoffs need to be made along the way (Goldberg & Gustafson, 2023).

Strategists and applied researchers who wish to leverage emotions in environmental communication are met with a variety of challenges. However, these challenges also present opportunities for generating more insight from research and interventions at the intersection of affective science and environmental communication. Below, I highlight three main challenges and suggest opportunities that might help us overcome them.

The Causal Effect of Emotion in Environmental Communication

A central question is what emotions can do to enhance environmental communication. More specifically, the goal of investigations into this question is to identify the causal effect of using emotion in environmental messaging interventions.

There are many steps between the intended effects of an emotional message, and how it is perceived, processed, and interpreted by the receiver of the message. That is, emotions are often understood as inherently an interaction between some event (or stimulus or message) and the goals, beliefs, and concerns of the person experiencing the event (Lazarus, 1991; Moors et al., 2013). This presents a challenge for understanding the causal effects of emotion in environmental communication because people often differ widely in those goals, beliefs, and concerns.

Researchers in the affective sciences have devised many ways to induce emotions or general affective states as a way to study the causal effects of emotion on a range of outcome measures. For example, researchers might show respondents pictures of emotionally evocative situations, have them read a short story that evokes a particular emotional state, or recall a personal event that produced a specific emotional reaction (for a review and meta-analysis, see Joseph et al., 2020). These procedures are often used to generate insights about the effects of certain affective states on the persuasiveness of a given message.

However, practitioners and applied researchers often want to know how emotions can be used in their messaging to reach a particular goal, such as increasing participation in collective action, donation behavior, or other forms of pro-environmental behavior. Researchers who seek to shed light on these types of questions often present respondents with different kinds of messages that are expected to evoke a particular emotional state. The challenge is that this confounds message content with emotion induction. When researchers test, for example, a hopeful message versus a threatening message, the messages differ on both their specific content as well as the emotions they evoke. This makes it difficult to tell whether the content, the emotion, both, or neither are driving differences between different types of messages. This is also a challenge for practitioners because it leaves unclear whether it is more effective to optimize for a particular type of content or a particular type of emotional response.

We can turn this challenge into an opportunity by experimenting with factors that are not part of the message wording but are nonetheless influential. Consider the finding that political videos have been found to have about twice the persuasive impact as the text transcript of the video (Wittenberg et al., 2021; also see Goldberg et al., 2019 for a related finding on climate change communication). We know that in these studies the message content was identical aside from the factors that have to do with the difference in message medium, such as the video's imagery, music, or other emotionally evocative factors that might drive these differences. There is a lot to learn from the affective sciences on the factors that are most promising for further investigation, and how we might go about studying those factors.

The Role of Emotion in Generating Durable Messaging Effects

One important and growing area of research on environmental communication that needs more systematic attention is the durability of messaging effects (Goldberg, Gustafson & van der Linden, 2020). The overwhelming majority of messaging research in this topic area (and beyond) measures effects immediately after respondents receive a message, leaving unknown whether the effects we observe last beyond the few minutes respondents spend in the survey experiment. This challenge presents an opportunity for researchers in environmental communication and the affective sciences to learn from each other on how to generate the most insight about the durability of message effects in environmental communication.

We have good reason to believe that emotions can potentially help generate long-lasting messaging effects, which can improve environmental communication. This potential lies, in part, in the evidence that emotions can affect the extent of thinking (for a review, see Petty & Briñol, 2015), which we know affects the durability of messaging effects (Chong & Druckman, 2010, 2013; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Even if the emotional response is a transient state, if it enhances the depth of processing of information, then persuasion can be more durable even long after the emotional response has subsided. Put simply, persuasion is more durable when people put more thought into the considerations raised by the message.

Another promising research area to learn more about the potential role of emotions in the durability of environmental messaging effects is research on how emotions affect motivation and information processing (Nabi, 2003). That is, emotions can affect the interpretation and selection of subsequent information, such as when threat messages are more persuasive when followed by a message that bolsters efficacy to address the threat (Nabi, Gustafson & Jensen, 2018; Witte & Allen, 2000). Nabi's “emotions as frames” model proposes that instead of functioning as persuasive in themselves, emotions set the stage for how and which information is processed. Building on the example above, threatening messages are likely to evoke fear, which might lead people to prioritize information and decisions that mitigate the threat over other available information. So it is not necessarily the fear itself that is persuasive, but instead acts as a frame that guides information seeking and processing. This has important implications for studying persuasion durability in environmental communication.

Closing the Gap Between the Lab and the Field

A unique challenge for studying the effects of emotions in environmental communication is that common emotion induction procedures are difficult or impossible to apply in real-world messaging contexts. For example, if one wants to study the role of emotion in increasing persuasion, donation behavior, or collective action in real-world contexts (e.g., via field experiments), it is often not possible to have people sit and write a short essay on the deep connections between the environment and their sense of self. Our experimental capabilities outside the laboratory are usually much more constrained. Further, even if we learn how emotion can be leveraged to improve environmental communication, the world outside the laboratory includes other obstacles, such as decisions to consume or engage with the message in the first place, depending on expectations about the message's emotional content (Skurka et al., 2022).

This challenge presents an important opportunity for the affective sciences to study the role of emotion during real-time environmental hazards such as extreme heat (Howe et al., 2019) or wildfires (Hazlett & Mildenberger, 2020). The constraints of doing research outside the artificial conditions of the laboratory or survey environment force us to examine the communication tools at our disposal, or grapple with the need to innovate and invent new ones. Further, focusing on real-world impacts also raises important basic research questions about the role emotion plays in emerging real-world events, how long it lasts, and what kinds of impacts they have. We can generate additional insight from this research by cultivating a positive feedback loop between laboratory and field research, where laboratory data can inform real-world communication campaigns (e.g., Falk et al., 2012), and field research can raise important basic research questions that are better studied in the lab. Scholars in the affective sciences and in environmental communication are well-positioned to make large contributions by taking this approach.

Conclusion

In this article, I have highlighted three areas where environmental communication researchers can have a mutually beneficial and synergistic relationship with researchers in the affective sciences. The challenges I raise come with significant opportunities to learn more about (a) the causal effects of emotions in environmental communication; (b) the effect of emotions on the durability of environmental messaging effects; and (c) how grappling with real-world constraints can foster innovation and more applicable inferences. The importance of emotions to human thinking and behavior makes them essential to understanding how to motivate people to take action to address our most pressing environmental problems, and this article charts some territory that outlines key paths forward.