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Psychology

Theses/Dissertations

Climate change

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Climate Grief And Dance Movement Therapy: A Literature Review, Elisabeth Lovin May 2024

Climate Grief And Dance Movement Therapy: A Literature Review, Elisabeth Lovin

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Research is starting to focus on the effects of climate change on mental health, especially future-oriented anxieties and uncertainty about our planet’s liveability. Less commonly discussed are feelings of grief for the climate-related losses we have already sustained. This thesis organizes current literature about climate grief and data about the psychosomatic effects of climate-related losses and examines general grief counseling research, as well as presenting applications of dance movement therapy for grief and loss. Cultural and historical gestures and movements of grieving bodies and portrayals of grief in dance history support the proposal that dance movement therapists are capable of …

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Using Empathy To Shift Climate Change Attitudes., Carson Haller May 2024

Using Empathy To Shift Climate Change Attitudes., Carson Haller

Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

It has shifted from a hunch to an existential threat, it is a harbinger of disaster and bankruptcy, backed by science, and yet a considerable portion of Americans still believe that climate change is a hoax. It is becoming increasingly imperative to convince this portion to join the fight. It has been found that empathy is an effective method of persuasion, prompting the question of whether empathy could be used shift climate change attitudes. The hypothesis of this study was that if a person feels empathy for somebody harmed by the effects of climate change, they will be more willing …

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Climate Change Message Framing, Death Anxiety, And Conspiracy Beliefs Impact On Individual Emotions, Cognitions, And Future Behavioral Intentions, Shanna E. Castellucci May 2023

Climate Change Message Framing, Death Anxiety, And Conspiracy Beliefs Impact On Individual Emotions, Cognitions, And Future Behavioral Intentions, Shanna E. Castellucci

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Prospect theory highlighted that individuals are more sensitive to loss frames than gain frames. However, previous literature involving message framing, emotion, and behaviors found that gain frames have more of an impact on whether an individual will engage in desired behaviors. The purpose of this experiment was to analyze the relationships between message framing, death anxiety, conspiracy beliefs, and future behavioral intentions. Participants were randomly assigned to the framing condition: either in the loss frame group or in the gain frame group. There were three hypotheses tested in this study. The first predicted that individuals receiving the loss frame would …

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Less Meat, Less Heat: Analyzing Meat Consumption Through The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Identity, Past Behavior, And Conservatism, Madeleine Powers Jan 2023

Less Meat, Less Heat: Analyzing Meat Consumption Through The Theory Of Planned Behavior, Identity, Past Behavior, And Conservatism, Madeleine Powers

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Meat reduction is a largely underutilized means of combatting climate change that warrants further investigation. The current study utilized an extended model of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to predict intention to eat red meat. In addition to traditional TPB components of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, this study adds to the literature by including meat-eating identity, past meat-eating behavior, and conservatism as predictors of meat consumption intentions. 744 participants were recruited via Mturk and compensated $1 for completing surveys assessing the extended TPB constructs related to meat consumption. The sample was 57% men, and 81% white, …

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Grieving Climate Change: A Psychological And Personal Exploration Of Emotionally Processing The Climate Crisis, Hava Chishti Jan 2023

Grieving Climate Change: A Psychological And Personal Exploration Of Emotionally Processing The Climate Crisis, Hava Chishti

Pitzer Senior Theses

The psychological concept of grief, although not typically associated with climate change, has strong applications to the emotional processing of climate change for human beings. Grief can be related to climate change in many ways, including the grief that individuals may feel over the anticipated loss of their future, losses that may be experienced due to climate-related disasters, and grief for the overall implications of anthropogenic climate change. A mixture of traditional literature analysis and creative nonfiction essays, which focus on personal narratives from interviews and the author’s experience, are used to outline the ways in which the psychology of …

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The Roles Of Identity And Beliefs About Social Change In Decision Making Processes For Identity-Laden Social Change Efforts, Joel Ginn Oct 2022

The Roles Of Identity And Beliefs About Social Change In Decision Making Processes For Identity-Laden Social Change Efforts, Joel Ginn

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents three investigations into distinct processes that attempt to explain people’s decision making around social change action in three identity-laden domains. Chapter 1 reviews existing literature and theory on how social identity and social change beliefs can impact social change action. Chapter 2 examines identity-based motivated cognition by showing how identification as a meat-eater leads to biased estimates of meat reduction’s climate change impacts. Chapter 3 examines cisgender student reactions to faculty who use gender pronouns as an inclusion strategy for transgender and gender nonconforming students to examine if this action leads to stereotyping and judgement. Chapter 4 …

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Coping With Climate Change, Andrea Yj Mah May 2022

Coping With Climate Change, Andrea Yj Mah

Masters Theses

Climate change is a source of anxiety and stress. To be resilient to the changes that are occurring, individuals must cope with that stress. Because there are many ways that people might manage stress we examined variation in coping strategy use among Americans who reported some concern about climate change to understand generally how people cope with such stress, and whether it can be predicted from individual difference factors, namely degree of climate change concern and political ideology. We examined these variables specifically because in the study of responses to climate change, conservatives and liberals often report divergent beliefs, attitudes, …

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The Climate Crisis: How Communication And Norms Interact With Attitudes And Actions, Kathryn Aldstadt May 2022

The Climate Crisis: How Communication And Norms Interact With Attitudes And Actions, Kathryn Aldstadt

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The present study investigated the effect of communication strategies and social norms on peoples’ self-reported environmental attitudes and actions. Communication strategies that cause high-fear levels in viewers can often cause distress, thereby increasing the likelihood that viewers will disregard a message in favor of protecting themselves (Clayton, 2020; Hornsey et al., 2015). Communication strategies that cause low-fear can serve as healthy motivators for action (Nestler & Egloff, 2012). Social norms are powerful, and people are likely to follow the same behavior pattern as others. In the current study, participants (N=71) watched a Public Service Announcement (PSA) video and either had …

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Graduating Greener: Analysis Of A Non-Price Intervention To Encourage Pro-Environmental Behavior Among College Students, Jillie Santos Jan 2022

Graduating Greener: Analysis Of A Non-Price Intervention To Encourage Pro-Environmental Behavior Among College Students, Jillie Santos

Honors Theses

According to the Yale Program on Climate Communication, a majority of Americans report worrying about climate change, yet the proportion of Americans who discuss climate change often with friends and family is around half of the worried percentage. This discrepancy illustrates a habit of climate avoidance and climate inaction. Drawing upon psychology and human-centered design, I assisted Dr. Michael A. Smyer in developing Graduating Greener, a workshop aimed at disrupting climate avoidance and promoting pro-environmental behavior through a sequence of social, environmentally-based activities. In this thesis, I investigate concepts from the field of behavioral economics which inform and align with …

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Getting The Message Across: Flexitarians As Messengers For Meat's Climate Change Impacts, Joel Ginn Feb 2021

Getting The Message Across: Flexitarians As Messengers For Meat's Climate Change Impacts, Joel Ginn

Masters Theses

Meat consumption has been a prominent part of humanity’s dietary culture, particularly in modern, Western developed nations. However, recent research has shown that collectively reducing our consumption of animal products can have major benefits for mitigating our environmental footprint. Despite a consensus among climate scientists on its potential impact, the public does not recognize the effectiveness of this behavioral shift. Recent efforts to address this have created movements and organizations that focus on reduction of meat consumption (e.g. flexitarianism, reducetarianism, Meatless Mondays), rather than elimination of meat consumption (e.g. vegetarianism, veganism) with the intent of creating a more acceptable message, …

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Delay And Geographic Discounting Exert Multiple Control Over Climate Change Policy Preference, Celeste Noelle Unnerstall May 2020

Delay And Geographic Discounting Exert Multiple Control Over Climate Change Policy Preference, Celeste Noelle Unnerstall

MSU Graduate Theses

The procedures were informed by a pilot investigation conducted by this research team that is described below. In the primary study, students attending Missouri State University chose between a policy with no restrictions or taxation on their carbon emissions versus a restriction on the amount of mileage driven per month and taxation related to the mileage. The main study also included an added variable of the influence a redistribution taxation policy into different geographic distances would have on policy preference. Results were interpreted in terms of a multilevel hyperbolic discounting model using the “R” program. The results suggest that there …

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Listen For The Desert: An Ecopsychological Autoethnography, Dorothy Cashore Aug 2019

Listen For The Desert: An Ecopsychological Autoethnography, Dorothy Cashore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What does it mean for human beings to be part of nature – not just as a conceptual justification for doing right by the planet, but actually as an embodied, emotional, and sensuous experience? What happens to the experience of being human when notions as fundamental as voice, absence, suffering, and psyche are re-encountered from a perspective rooted within, rather than apart from, the natural world? While this dissertation responds to these questions, it initially took shape in response to something that felt less like a research question and more like a summons. Following a startling experience of feeling called …

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Youth Screening Protocol For General Psychopathology, Steven Bishop Jan 2019

Youth Screening Protocol For General Psychopathology, Steven Bishop

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a high prevalence rate of psychopathology among US youth, with at least one in four youth meeting clinical criteria for a mental health condition. Those youths who experience psychopathology tend to demonstrate greater functional impairments and have more adverse outcomes compared to youth who do not have these frequently occurring conditions. It is unfortunate that many of these conditions, along with their deleterious effects, are poorly identified in pediatric settings despite the availability of screening instruments. Most screening instruments, however, assess for domain-specific areas of psychopathology only, and can require substantial time to administer and interpret within the …

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Affective Images Of Climate Change: Analysis And Database Development, Elizabeth Lehman Aug 2018

Affective Images Of Climate Change: Analysis And Database Development, Elizabeth Lehman

All NMU Master's Theses

Although climate change has become an increasingly popular topic in both research and the public-eye, there is little standardization of the images used to represent it. The differences in expert and non-expert climate imagery is also problematic. This study aims to resolve both of these issues: first by analyzing participants’ ratings of 320 images on their relevance to climate change as well as emotional arousal and valence; then by compiling these images and their affective characteristics into a database for use in future climate-related research. Participants’ environmental attitudes were surveyed to investigate the relationship between attitudes and image ratings. High-arousal, …

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Dismantling The Climate Denial Machine: Theory And Methods, David A. Mickolas Apr 2017

Dismantling The Climate Denial Machine: Theory And Methods, David A. Mickolas

Senior Theses and Projects

Many Americans do not believe in the existence of climate change, and even those who believe climate change exists often seriously underestimate its potential harms as predicted by the world's best scientific organizations. Most political scholars agree that much higher consensus among American citizens is necessary to create necessary policy reform to mitigate climate change, both in the US and at large. However, there are also organizations who actively wish to deter and decrease belief in climate change among US citizens, not for the sake of scientific skepticism, but for personal benefit from preventing policy reform. This text examines what …

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Secondhand Communication Of Risk-Related Information: How Ideology And Relational Motives Affect Interpersonal Risk Communication, Daniel A. Chapman Jul 2016

Secondhand Communication Of Risk-Related Information: How Ideology And Relational Motives Affect Interpersonal Risk Communication, Daniel A. Chapman

Masters Theses

This research provides the first experimental investigation of the ways in which ideological and relational motives influence interpersonal risk communication. Drawing on the literatures in social and cognitive psychology, risk communication, and environmental decision making, this research examined whether individuals expressing concerns about tradeoffs between climate change adaptation and prevention were less likely to share climate change information with others if the information discussed adaptation policies. Participants were presented with an article about climate change framed as either relating to adaptation or prevention. Their willingness to share the article with others was measured, as well as their appraisals of how …

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Role Of Dignity In Rural Natural Resource Governance, Tora Johnson Dec 2015

Role Of Dignity In Rural Natural Resource Governance, Tora Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dignity is “an internal state of peace that comes with the recognition and acceptance of the value and vulnerability of all living things” (Hicks, 2011, p. 1). Dignity is a crucial element in effective governance arrangements. This study applies dignity theory, and related theories of natural resource governance and environmental communication, to understand and overcome barriers to effective governance of common pool resources in rural communities. Chapter 1 reviews relevant literature on natural resource governance and develops a theoretical framework for dignity. Chapter 2 applies dignity theory to a contentious comprehensive planning process in a small Maine town in order …

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Politicized Climate Change Communication: An Integrative Complexity Analysis, Meredith A. Repke Jan 2015

Politicized Climate Change Communication: An Integrative Complexity Analysis, Meredith A. Repke

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The vast majority of scientists agree that anthropogenic activities have caused the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to rise at an unprecedented rate, and that the consequences of such a rise may very well be extreme. Despite these warnings, the American people do not possess, on average, the same level of concern towards climate change as scientists. The polarization of media in recent decades, the prevalence of selective exposure, and the general position on climate change of the two major political parties have led to liberals and conservatives consuming different information relevant to climate science. While evidence exists …

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Defense Against Defensiveness: How Important Personal Values Can Promote More Adaptive Responses To Severe Environmental Threat, Kathryn Schuett Jan 2015

Defense Against Defensiveness: How Important Personal Values Can Promote More Adaptive Responses To Severe Environmental Threat, Kathryn Schuett

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

People respond defensively to threatening risk information about the future. For example, people may respond with denial to threatening information about environmental consequences, resulting in inaction which ironically increases the risk. The current thesis was designed to examine individuals’ responses to future climate change risk when under different types and levels of threat. We predicted defensive response under threat, but also sought to investigate a factor that might mitigate defensiveness: reflecting on personally important values. In Study 1 we sought to examine individuals’ responses to a climate risk message after they were induced to feel low or high personal control …

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Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

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Climate Change In The Media: Collective Guilt And Behavioral Effects Of News Reports And Environmental Identity, Amanda Koehn Jan 2012

Climate Change In The Media: Collective Guilt And Behavioral Effects Of News Reports And Environmental Identity, Amanda Koehn

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

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Environmental Worldview And Faith In Science As Moderators Of The Relationship Between Beliefs About And Attitudes Toward Nuclear Energy, Adam D. Carton Apr 2010

Environmental Worldview And Faith In Science As Moderators Of The Relationship Between Beliefs About And Attitudes Toward Nuclear Energy, Adam D. Carton

Psychology Theses

Global climate change (GCC) may be the most pressing social and environmental issue of our time. The use of fossil fuels tops the list of human behaviors that contribute to GCC. Several ‘alternative’ energy sources are now being considered in an effort to mitigate GCC, including—controversially—nuclear energy. Examined here were environmental worldview and faith in science as moderators of the relationship between beliefs about and attitudes toward nuclear energy (ATNE). Participants were 272 college students who completed an on-line survey. Predictor variables were beliefs about whether nuclear energy contributes to GCC (GCC-beliefs) and to energy independence (EI-beliefs). Results indicated that …

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