Climate emotions team took part in an annual conference of the Society for Social Neuroscience in Tsukuba, Japan. We have presented two posters, reporting our first results from fMRI studies on climate emotions and climate action taking. Take a look at our data! preregistered experimental study and a unique method used to categorize emotional stimuli.
Małgorzata presented a poster about the adaptation of the Carbon Emission Task (CET) to the fMRI settings. CET is an experimental procedure that allows us to measure how willing is the person to sacrifice their own financial gain in order to help the climate (Berger, Wyss 2021). In order to measure brain activity during climate action taking, we adapted the CET to fMRI scanner environment – e.g. increased the number of trials, simplified the visual field and added dummy trials (no decision making) to control for the motor activity. We also showed, that the results of the original behavioral study can be replicated.
Dominika talked about brain activity during the experience of climate emotions. The participants read emotional climate change stories, and we were able to identify regions of increased activity during this activity. Interestingly, we observed activations in regions responsible for i.e. social cognition and self-refferential processing.
GROUP PHOTO FROM THE 2024 TSUKUBA MEETING ORGANISED BY MONIQUE SMITH (PROGRAM CHAIR) AND SONOKO OGAWA (LOCAL CHAIR) ALONG WITH MANY VOLUNTEERS. From: https://www.s4sn.org/