Climate Change Imagery: The Role of Personality on Emotional Experience

Many people view climate change as one of the top issues facing the world today. As a result, a better understanding of how climate change messages are communicated has become increasingly important. Additionally, with the progression of today’s society into that of highly-visual culture, opportunities for the investigation at the intersection of climate change and visual content would be of great benefit to academia and society, as a whole. More specifically, providing insight into how climate change visuals are framed and what their relationship is to emotions would support visual framing theory and present opportunities to strengthen climate change messaging in the future. Taking a quantitative approach, this research deploys experimental design to test hypotheses and answer research questions on the relationships among three climate change visual frames (causes, impacts, solutions), emotional experience, and climate change salience. In addition, to attempt to provide further insight into these relationships, the personality traits neuroticism and extraversion are tested as moderators. A sample provided from Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 289) was evenly disturbed between three experimental conditions, each representative of one of the climate change visual frames. Statistical analysis was then utilized to generate results in response to hypotheses one thru eleven and research questions one and two. The findings from this study show that climate change visual frames each generate specific emotional experiences upon viewing. The causes and impacts climate change visual frames result in a negative emotional experience, while the solutions climate change visual frame generates a positive emotional experience. However, this research found no support for the personality traits neuroticism or extraversion playing a role in that response. Similarly, there was no connection found between emotional experience and climate change salience. The findings of this research, however, ultimately support the effectiveness of climate change visual frames without their traditional accompanying text, in the form of a caption or story, and contribute to visual framing theory. Considering the effectiveness of stand-alone climate change visual frames in generating positive and negative emotional experiences can prove useful for practitioners in the creation of future climate change content