Predictors of visual attention to climate change images: An eye-tracking study

Participants with high pro-environmental orientation spent more time looking at climate change as well as other negative images, compared to participants with low pro-environmental orientation. This result suggests that pro-environmental individuals might be characterized by a general propensity to attend to negative information. Furthermore, stress reduced attentional deployment to both climate change and negative control images, which might indicate decreased interest in self-transcendent problems and/or increased efforts of emotion regulation under stress. In summary, these findings constitute first evidence for trait and state predictors of attentional engagement with climate change.