Difficult climate emotions among late adolescents: What role does social trust play in the associations with general mental wellbeing and climate-friendly behaviour?
Young people experience difficult emotions regarding the future and climate change. Worry being the most common, as well as a mix of difficult emotions in relation to climate change; climate distress. Are these emotions related to low mental well-being in general, or should they be seen as something positive that motivates young people to act more climate friendly?
In June 2025 Maria Ojala kept a presentation at the International Conference on Environmental Psychology, ICEP, in Vilnius, Lithuania, based on the research conducted in this project. In her presentation she discussed how social trust – characterized by perceiving other people as trustworthy, helpful and fair – might be related to general mental well-being and climate-friendly behaviour. Previous studies have found that climate-change related worry is consistently associated with climate-friendly behaviours. However, the relation between climate-friendly behaviour and climate-change related distress is not as clear. Moreover, general trust has been found to buffer stress and to be related to civic engagement among young people, but little research has been done on how social trust is related to climate change worry and distress. Therefore, Ojala and colleagues aimed to investigate if and how the climate emotions of worry and distress are related to both general well-being and climate-friendly behaviours, and what role social trust plays in these possible relationships.
The study found that social trust does not influence the possible relationships between climate-change emotions and general mental well-being, regarding climate-change worry and life satisfaction. Therefore, social trust seems to be a factor that is important in itself for both general mental wellbeing and climate-friendly behaviours. Additionally, it also to a certain degree reduces the negative effects of climate-change related worry and distress on mental well-being, as well as enabling the relationships between both climate-change related worry and distress and climate friendly behaviours.