Climate Communications Evoking both Negative and Positive Emotions Drive Advocacy

Emotions are critical components of climate change communication and can be key levers to driving action on climate change. Here, we map a large corpus of messages to their emotional signatures to offer actionable insights on designing climate communications that mobilize action without overwhelming audiences. In two experiments, we tested how 17 expert-elicited climate interventions influenced the emotional experiences and climate advocacy actions of a quota-matched sample of US residents (N Study 1=31,324), and then isolated the underlying mechanisms at play (N Study 2=1,986). Both negative and positive emotions, especially anger, guilt, sadness and hope, fueled public, political, and financial advocacy. Moreover, despite their diverse theoretical underpinnings, climate communications that were most effective in driving advocacy had notably similar emotional profiles— they simultaneously evoked both positive and negative emotions.