ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1575185
From Eco-consciousness to Apathy: The ECO-SHADOW Inventory to Assess Cognitive and Behavioral Affect Regulation and its Role in Climate Action
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
- 2Natural History Museum of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
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The climate change crisis continues to have interrelated health, economic, and societal consequences; yet how people psychologically manage these challenges remains underexplored. Specifically, people may have distinct ways of dealing with the realities of climate change, which can impact their wellbeing and influence their engagement in climate action. Thus, the current work aimed to evaluate how people manage their cognition and behavior specific to climate change. We developed and validated a new comprehensive measure called ECO-SHADOW to assess how people manage their reactions to climate change. The existing literature on climate change was integrated with theoretical perspectives from affect regulation literature to generate potential strategies for managing cognitions and behaviors. Based on data collected (N=566), exploratory factor analysis identified nine affect regulation factors underlying nearly 60 strategies: Ecoconsciousness, Conflict, Outcast, Spirituality, Hope, Apathy, Doom, Overplay, and Withdrawal. The ECO-SHADOW inventory is a reliable, valid, and currently the most exhaustive measure of the wide-ranging cognitive and behavioral regulation strategies employed to process climate change challenges, with some being more adaptive toward climate action (such as eco-consciousness and hope), while others being maladaptive (including apathy, withdrawal, doom, or overplay). Further work is needed to examine how affect regulation efforts relate to addressing the climate change crisis. We hope that the ECO-SHADOW inventory inspires future research promoting effective affect regulation and its connections to sustainable climate action.
Keywords: Climate Change, Cognition and behavior, affect regulation, Psychometrics, wellbeing, sustainability
Received: 12 Feb 2025; Accepted: 22 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lohani, Janney, Wei, Zummo and Blodgett. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Monika Lohani, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
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