Not just anxious: validating the French Inventory of Climate Emotions and exploring climate emotions profiles among young adults

While several French-language scales assess climate anxiety, no tool captures the broader spectrum of climate emotions. Yet the emotional experience of the environmental crisis is multidimensional and the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE) was developed and validated to address this gap. This study aimed to validate its French version and use it to identify emotional profiles among young French people (18-30 years old, N=1650). Psychometric analysis revealed good sensitivity, acceptable reliability and satisfactory indicators for several validity aspects (structural, convergent, divergent, nomological) – although powerlessness and hope showed consistently weaker indices. The Latent Profile Analysis conducted to identify emotional patterns revealed four distinct profiles, including three "atypical" ones (hostile, angry and affected) significantly associated with gender, political orientation or connectedness to nature. This study thus provides a validated instrument assessing climate emotions in French-speaking contexts, with potential applications in interventions and research settings – including the study of climate emotion profiles.