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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1560024
This article is part of the Research Topic Climate Change Anxiety View all 6 articles
Eco-anxiety or Simply Eco-worry? Incremental Validity Study in a Representative Spanish Sample
Provisionally accepted- 1 Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
- 2 University of Almeria, Almería, Andalusia, Spain
- 3 Rey Juan Carlos University, Móstoles, Spain
Scientific literature is keen to promote the study of eco-anxiety despite its current low prevalence and inconsistent relationships with pro-environmental behavior and mental health. In this paper, we analyze in a representative sample of the Spanish population (N = 1911) the incremental validity of the eco-worry construct concerning that of eco-anxiety at three levels of environmental commitment: high (environmental activists), medium (people who are not part of any environmental organization but who would like to), and low (people who neither belong to environmental groups nor want to). Our results showed that 1) the environmental activists in our sample did not seem to be eco-anxious but rather eco-worried, and 2) at the three levels of environmental commitment, eco-worry but not eco-anxiety positively mediated the relationship between climate change perception and general willingness for environmental behavior, and eco-worry, but not eco-anxiety, positively connected with life satisfaction through the general willingness to behave pro-environmentally. It is concluded that eco-anxiety does not add anything to the more intuitive and non-pathological concept of ecoworry, except for the alarm signal, which is not at all strategic when the goal is to promote individual pro-environmental behaviors and collective social actions.
Keywords: Eco-anxiety1, Eco-worry2, climate change3, perception4, Life satisfaction5
Received: 13 Jan 2025; Accepted: 17 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Vecina, Alonso-Ferres and Díaz-Silveira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Cintia Díaz-Silveira, Rey Juan Carlos University, Móstoles, Spain
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