The Emotional Substrates of Environmental Preferences

Despite the growing global public significance of climate change, popular attitudes and political
approaches to the issue remain highly polarised. As researchers begin to recognise that this discourse is
increasingly framed emotively, a lacuna in our existing understandings emerges; what role do emotions
play in the formation of environmental preferences?
A broad array of political science research has demonstrated the power of emotions in shaping
individual political participation and attitudes, built around Affective Intelligence Theory, which
highlights the role that discrete emotions within the three dimensions of fear, anger and enthusiasm
play in attitude formation and change. In environmental politics, similar research exploring the
relationship between a variety of discrete emotions and individual attitudes toward global warming, but
has restricted its focus to the responses of individuals to emotional stimuli. Thus, there has been a
failure to explore the way in which climate actors employ emotions and the way they operate on a mass
level.
In the light of the above, this PhD research will aim at advancing knowledge on the impact of emotions
on environmental attitudes by answering the central research question of: in the policy area of climate
governance a) how do governments and social movements operationalise emotion b) how emotions
mobilize people to participate in environmental movements and c) how emotions affect environmental
attitudes in mass publics?
The research framework designed around this question will begin with a first year developing a detailed
research framework and extensive literature review, followed by a second year devoted to data
collection. The data gathered will then be used in the third year to fulfil two objectives.
First, to establish the impact that emotions have on mass publics in relation to environmental issues,
using lab experiments to investigate the impact of environmental-related emotional stimuli on political
behaviour and attitudes in the UK and USA. This thesis will here build upon existing research by
attempting to distinguish and explore the discrete impacts of the emotional dimensions of anger,
enthusiasm, and anxiety on how environmental attitudes are formed and how they change.
Given the possibilities of new environmental developments generating new areas of research, the
potential to conduct a natural experiment should also be recognised, building on similarly designed
studies exploring how unexpected threats impact upon political attitudes.
Second, to explore the ways that actors employ emotions in the operations of climate governance,
studying the use of emotional power by actors in climate governance contexts, moving beyond the
isolated, individual and reception-focused analysis that characterises current environmental emotional
research. This will be achieved through a quantitative emotional discourse analysis of environmental
speeches and policy manifestos from governmental elites and activist groups, a newly emerging method
with this thesis its first use in environmental politics. This analysis will be used to differentiate between
each emotional dimension of AIT and explore the relative status in climate discourse, something that
once again has not been done before.

In combining both research objectives, this thesis aims to reveal the nature of emotional discursive
power as wielded by climate actors, and the impacts this has on mass publics, in order to better
understand the role of emotion in climate governance. In advancing understandings of attitude
formation and climate communication, this research may contribute to the establishment of a
progressive hegemony of climate policy and the preservation of our natural world. More generally, this
thesis will further understandings of democratic health, helping us to understand the impact of
emotions in political discourse upon popular democratic engagement and understanding.