Monday, 18 May 2026
A new study has shown that messages of hope can be effective in promoting creative problem-solving around sustainability.
Experts from the 海角黑料’s School of Psychology developed a new measure of climate creativity that indicates that positive emotions have a different effect to negative emotions in promoting problem solving in undertaking climate action. The study has been published in the
Professor Alexa Spence led the study and said: “We wanted to explore the theory that positive emotions may have a broader impact on behaviour, and be more likely to produce creative behaviour. We all too often see negative emotions, such as fear, guilt, and anger used to try to influence sustainable behaviour, and whilst they may create an initial short-term reaction, we propose that positive emotions may have different, wider reaching and longer lasting effects.”
The researchers undertook two studies, with 160 participants and 334 participants respectively, to examine the idea of climate creativity, and whether the positive emotion of hope can inspire climate creativity as a means by which to promote climate action and a sustainable future.
A climate creativity task was developed as a measure, asking people to generate ways in which they could make their life more sustainable and participants were asked to complete a number of further tasks examining different facets of creativity including word association tasks and environmental problem solving.
The second study built on this with emotions relating to climate change experimentally manipulated using video communications to randomly allocate people to experience hope or fear in relation to climate change.
The hope video had an optimistic stance in commenting on climate change: potential mitigation approaches were highlighted, and language was positive and cheerful with uplifting background music. The fear video had a pessimistic stance: doubts were expressed about the efficacy of solutions and language was alarming and negative with downbeat background music and a dark filter on the imagery used.
After watching the videos the participants completed general measures of creativity and the new climate creativity task.
The results of the study indicates that inspiring hope in climate change is related to increased levels of creativity, and specifically climate creativity. This is the first study of its kind to identify increases in climate creativity as a result of hope communications indicating that hope may be a resource to draw on in promoting problem solving and action on climate change. Theoretically, positive emotions are more likely to inspire social behaviour and longer lasting behaviour change and therefore also have the potential to inspire positive feedback loops where further environmental actions are seen as a consequence.
“Our research implies that for campaigns encouraging behaviours that are particularly difficult, where people may encounter barriers they need to overcome, positive communications that inspire creativity may be beneficial in promoting action.”
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More information is available from Professor Alexa Spence on Alexa.spence@nottingham.ac.uk
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