Emotional reactions to environmental risks: Consequentialist versus ethical evaluation

Abstract

Emotional reactions to environmental risks are investigated. Four types of emotion are distinguished: prospective (e.g. fear) and retrospective (e.g. sadness) consequence-based emotions, and other-related (e.g. anger) and self-related (e.g. guilt) ethics-based emotions. A study is presented in which various environmental risks were presented to participants. For each environmental risk, participants (a) rated the intensity of several consequence- and ethics-based emotions and (b) gave judgments pertaining to their evaluation of the causes and consequences of the risk as well as to its morality. The pattern of the emotion ratings confirms the distinction between the four emotion types and yields a configuration of the environmental risks that is structured according to their causation and impact. Except for retrospective consequence-based emotions, each emotion type can be predicted from specific cognitive judgments.