How to citeHAHNEL, Ulf et al. Mental accounting mechanisms in energy decision-making and behaviour. In: Nature

Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior that may make people aware of the urgency to act to mitigate climate change and provide a motivational basis to engage in sustainable action. However, attempts to leverage emotions via climate communications have yielded unsatisfactory results, with many interventions failing to produce the desired behaviors. It is important to understand the underlying affective mechanisms when designing communications, rather than treating emotions as simple behavioral levers that directly impact behavior. Across two field experiments, we show that individual predispositions to experience positive emotions in an environmental context (trait affect) predict pro-environmental actions and corresponding shifts in affective states (towards personal as well as witnessed pro-environmental actions). Moreover, trait affect predicts the individual behavioral impact of positively valenced emotion-based intervention strategies from environmental messages. These findings have important implications for the targeted design of affect-based interventions aiming to promote sustainable behavior and may be of interest within other domains that utilize similar intervention strategies (e.g., within the health domain).

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Emotions and values are fundamentally connected. They both are psychological markers of subjective relevance and are thought to be deeply functionally intertwined: According to appraisal theories of emotion, emotions arise when value concerns are at stake; according to theories of value, a value that is threatened or supported gets infused with feelings. Surprisingly, while these assumptions are considered well established by researchers in the respective domains, up to now, empirical research has not provided much evidence supporting a link between values and emotions. To fill this gap, here we report results from three experiments demonstrating that values are indeed antecedents of emotions when emotional experiences arise in response to value-relevant stimuli. Individual differences in biospheric values predicted the intensity of emotional responses toward positive and negative information concerning nature and climate change, both when measured via psychophysiology (Experiment 1) and via self-report (Experiments 1-3). Primary appraisal was identified as the key process connecting values and emotions (Experiments 2-3), supporting the notion of appraisal theories that specific mechanisms of relevance detection underlie the elicitation of emotion. These findings may lead to new developments in value and emotion theories, potentially resulting in a stronger integration of the two constructs in a shared theoretical framework.

We studied the emotional processes that allow people to balance two competing desires: benefitting from dishonesty and keeping a positive self-image. We recorded physiological arousal (skin conductance and heart rate) during a computer card game in which participants could cheat and fail to report a certain card when presented on the screen to avoid losing their money. We found that higher skin conductance corresponded to lower cheating rates. Importantly, emotional intelligence regulated this effect; participants with high emotional intelligence were less affected by their physiological reactions than those with low emotional intelligence. As a result, they were more likely to profit from dishonesty. However, no interaction emerged between heart rate and emotional intelligence. We suggest that the ability to manage and control emotions can allow people to overcome the tension between doing right or wrong and license them to bend the rules.