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Climate change threatens mental health via increasing exposure to the social and economic disruptions created by extreme weather and large-scale climatic events, as well as through the anxiety associated with recognising the existential threat posed by the climate crisis. Considering the growing levels of climate change awareness across the world, negative emotions like anxiety and worry about climate-related risks are a potentially pervasive conduit for the adverse impacts of climate change on mental health. In this study, we examined how negative climate-related emotions relate to sleep and mental health among a diverse non-representative sample of individuals recruited from 25 countries, as well as a Norwegian nationally-representative sample. Overall, we found that negative climate-related emotions are positively associated with insomnia symptoms and negatively related to self-rated mental health in most countries. Our findings suggest that climate-related psychological stressors are significantly linked with mental health in many countries and draw attention to the need for cross-disciplinary research aimed at achieving rigorous empirical assessments of the unique challenge posed to mental health by negative emotional responses to climate change., Author(s): Charles Adedayo Ogunbode [sup.1] [sup.2] , Ståle Pallesen [sup.3] , Gisela Böhm [sup.3] [sup.4] , Rouven Doran [sup.3] , Navjot Bhullar [sup.5] , Sibele Aquino [sup.6] , Tiago Marot [...]

Prior research has shown a tendency for environmental problems to be rated as more severe at the global level than at the local level. The present article reports reanalyses of a large cross-cultural data set (Study 1: k = 22, N = 3,277) and new cross-cultural data (Study 2: k = 8, N = 1,131) examining the prevalence of this spatial bias in the rated severity of environmental problems along with analyses of individual and country-level predictors of this bias. Results from multilevel modeling analyses showed that spatial bias was greater for happier and younger individuals and for those from smaller communities. We interpret these results as evidence for self-serving and “place-serving” biases in which the bias tempers the severity of environmental problems in one’s local area. Considering the large cross-cultural evidence, we argue that spatial bias is a plausible candidate of a psychological universal identified by research in environmental psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]