How is cognitive reappraisal related to adolescents’ willingness to act on mitigating climate change? The mediating role of climate change risk perception and believed usefulness of actions

Abstract

One of the goals of environmental education is to guide adolescents towards engaging in more sustainable behaviors. Nevertheless, it is still uncertain what factors are associated with adolescents’ willingness to perform such type of behaviors to support, for instance, the fight against climate change. Thus, the development of effective educational strategies to boost adolescents’ willingness to act is a relevant subject of debate. An innovative strategy could be to cultivate their cognitive reappraisal, since recent evidence suggests that trait cognitive reappraisal is a precursor of pro-environmental behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this study was twofold: First, to explore the educational potential of adolescent’s willingness to act, and second, to explore the relationship between cognitive reappraisal and willingness to act, as well as possible explanatory mechanisms for this relationship. In the current study, 663 adolescents completed measures of trait cognitive reappraisal, climate change risk perception, believed usefulness of actions and degree of willingness to act. The results indicated that there was a certain degree of inconsistency between adolescents’ beliefs about the usefulness of climate change mitigation actions and their willingness to perform these actions, which represents an issue that could be addressed by environmental education. The results additionally revealed that adolescents who habitually used cognitive reappraisal showed stronger climate change risk perception and beliefs in the usefulness of climate change mitigation actions, which in turn was associated with greater willingness to act. Our findings advance the current knowledge about how adolescents perceive climate change mitigation behaviors, which can contribute to the design of educational strategies that effectively increment adolescents’ willingness to act.