The Emotional engagement of climate experts is related to their climate change perceptions and coping strategies

ENThe study aimed to reveal the role of emotions in Lithuanian climateexperts’perceptions of climate change (i.e., their beliefs about thecauses and risk perceptions of climate change) and fill the gap in scien-tific knowledge about the coping strategies that climate experts tend toemploy in order to deal with climate-change-related emotions. To inves-tigate climate experts’emotional reactions to climate change, weapplied a four-factor model comprising morality-based other- and self-related as well as consequence-based retrospective and prospectiveemotions. The results indicated that the climate experts showed greatvariation in their emotional reactions; two clusters of experts emerged–those who were emotionally engaged and those who were disengagedwith regard to climate change. Emotionally engaged experts were morelikely than their disengaged counterparts to emphasize anthropogenicclimate change, to believe that the consequences of climate changewould appear both locally and globally, and to consider the consequen-ces to be uncontrollable, dreadful, and morally unacceptable.Emotionally engaged and disengaged climate experts agreed on theextent to which they evaluated climate change as societally disputed.Additionally, experts working in the government were more emotionallyengaged with climate change issues than academics. Finally, in order todeal with climate-change-related emotions, emotionally engagedexperts were more likely to invoke problem- and emotion-focused cop-ing strategies, whereas the two groups of experts did not differ in theirtendencies to avoid climate change issues. Keywords: Climate experts; emotions; risk perception; coping.