Eco-Affective Cognition: How Environmental Change Shapes Perception, Emotion, and Decision-Making

As global environmental change accelerates, humans are increasingly exposed to a spectrum of climate-related stressors such as extreme weather events, ecosystem degradation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and landscape instability. These pervasive conditions impact not only physical health but also fundamental processes of perception, attention, risk evaluation, emotion–cognition interactions, and higher-order decision-making. Growing evidence shows that environmental instability shapes how people detect threats, allocate attention, interpret uncertainty, and engage in reasoning. Climate-related emotional states—such as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, ecological grief, and future-oriented worry—influence judgment, memory, executive function, and behavioural intentions, while hope, agency, and collective efficacy are key drivers of adaptation and engagement. Despite a surge in relevant studies, contributions remain fragmented across fields and lack integrative cognitive frameworks, pointing to the need for a comprehensive synthesis of how environmental change modulates psychological function.

The central goal of this Research Topic is to consolidate the emerging science of eco-affective cognition. We aim to bring together research that examines how dynamic environmental contexts modulate perception, emotion, memory, reasoning, and both individual and collective decision-making. Specific objectives include identifying perceptual biases toward environmental threats, understanding the effects of climate stressors on attention and vigilance, and exploring the cognitive–affective mechanisms underlying states such as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, and ecological grief. We seek to illuminate how emotional salience shapes reasoning and behaviour, the influence of hope, moral emotions, and efficacy in evaluation and adaptation, and how identity, social cognition, and collective processes underpin climate engagement or denial. By integrating complexity-based perspectives and methodological innovations, this topic ultimately aims to inform effective climate risk communication, policy development, and psychological support strategies.

This Research Topic welcomes methodological and theoretical contributions spanning laboratory studies, field research, and computational modelling, with a focus on the mechanisms linking environmental change to cognition and affect. We encourage submissions on, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Perception, attention, and environmental threat processing—including perceptual biases, attentional control, and experimental paradigms on emotional salience
- Cognitive and affective mechanisms in reasoning and decision-making—such as emotional influences on risk perception, pro-environmental behaviour, and roles of hope and efficacy
- Social cognition, identity, and collective responses—including climate engagement or denial, group dynamics, and justice-related cognition
- Multilevel and complexity-based approaches—addressing dynamic systems, non-linear processes, early warning indicators, and modelling eco-cognitive dynamics
- Digital, physiological, and behavioural biomarkers—such as digital phenotyping, stress biomarkers, spatial mapping, and methodological pipelines for in-the-wild cognition

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: perception; decision-making; environmental change; eco-anxiety; solastalgia; risk perception; affective cognition; complexity science; climate psychology

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.