Abstract
In a pioneering work, this study explores the potential that may be found in combining the environmental psychological concept environmental worldview with the neurocognitive study technique electroencephalography (EEG). With this research, we aim to bridge between the research traditions of environmental communication and neuro-cognition by investigating in an qEEG experiment (N = 19) if different levels of environmental worldview, measured by the NEP, influence the processing of visual climate change imagery, reflected by the theta and gamma oscillations in the frontal and parietal areas. Our results confirm the assumptions that there is a relationship between the degree of environmental worldview and visual environmental communication processing. The pattern is interpreted as an indication that people with weak pro-environmental worldviews show cognitive signs of mismatch between what is in line with their environmental worldview and what they are confronted with in the visual stimulus.
Highlights
Visual representations of climate change are often used in media coverage (Sheppard, 2012) and in campaigns that aim to motivate citizens to mitigate and adapt to the predicted consequences of climate change (Klöckner, 2015)
This might help environmental psychologists to understand how psychological constructs impact people’s reaction to visual information campaigns. This line of research is not well defined yet, we decided to focus on a very selected section of analysis: How does the degree to which an environmental worldview is embraced, affect the patterns of brain oscillations in the theta and gamma bands after exposure to visual representations of climate change? First we will present what is known about the relationship between visual communication, environmental worldviews and pro-climate action, to follow with a description of what neurocognitive research could add to this line of research and the setup for the current study and the results will be presented and discussed
There were no significant correlation between the percentage of error and the theta or gamma oscillations
Summary
Visual representations of climate change are often used in media coverage (Sheppard, 2012) and in campaigns that aim to motivate citizens to mitigate and adapt to the predicted consequences of climate change (Klöckner, 2015) For this reason, the effect of climate change imagery on inducing behavioural change has been subject to a variety of studies (see Klöckner (2015) for a summary). This research is almost exclusively built on self-report measures, while neurocognitive research on the other hand could provide a way to investigate these questions from a neuronal level This might help environmental psychologists to understand how psychological constructs impact people’s reaction to visual information campaigns. This line of research is not well defined yet, we decided to focus on a very selected section of analysis: How does the degree to which an environmental worldview is embraced, affect the patterns of brain oscillations in the theta and gamma bands after exposure to visual representations of climate change? First we will present what is known about the relationship between visual communication, environmental worldviews and pro-climate action, to follow with a description of what neurocognitive research could add to this line of research and the setup for the current study and the results will be presented and discussed.
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