Participants

Pauline Brouёr is a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. She earned her MSc in Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology at the University of Münster, Germany. Working with Dr. Adam Aron, her research focuses on the psychological factors that motivate individuals to take collective action in response to the climate and social crisis. She is particularly interested in the role of emotions as a driver of collective action, and in developing new methods to study climate action in real-world settings.

I’m Moana Drüe, 27, originally from Cologne, Germany, and currently a PhD student at the University of Vienna, exploring how environmental factors shape human thinking and decision-making. My work focuses on how heat influences cognition, emotions, and social as well as pro-environmental behaviour. I combine large-scale behavioral studies, controlled lab experiments, and fMRI methods to understand not just whether heat changes how we act, but why. Overall, I aim to create a connection between psychology, neuroscience, and climate research to better understand human behavior in a warming world, while contributing transparent, reproducible research grounded in open science principles.

My name is Félix Duplessis-Marcotte, and I am a final-year PsyD/PhD candidate in neuropsychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). I have long been fascinated by this simple conundrum: why do we sometimes make decisions that go against our own long-term interests? This led me to study how emotions shape decision-making, sometimes outside of conscious awareness. In my research, I use a psychobiological approach, combining hormonal measures (e.g., cortisol, testosterone) and psychophysiological indices (e.g., electrodermal activity) to better understand the affective processes involved in decision-making. Recently, my interests have shifted toward applying this work to climate change to understand how affective mechanisms can be leveraged to promote more sustainable behavior. I am especially interested in bridging fundamental research with real-world applications, and I look forward to learning from and connecting with others working at the intersection of emotion and sustainability.

As a PhD student in psychology at the University of Lausanne, my thesis focuses on the representations of the ecological crisis and the representations of the future among adolescents in Switzerland. I am also interested in the subjective experience associated with these issues and the coping strategies mobilized by young people to face them. To answer these questions, my project relies on a mixed design combining qualitative and quantitative methods. By adopting a participatory approach, I wish to conduct research with and for young people by integrating their point of view at every stage of the research process. By placing the voice of adolescents, often marginalized in public debates, at the heart of the analysis, my thesis seeks to better understand their experiences, their worries, but also their hopes in the face of ongoing ecological disruptions.

I am a PhD student in Philosophy in the Pisa-Florence doctoral program, in cotutelle with the University of Lausanne. I received both my BA and MA in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. My research lies at the intersection of moral philosophy and philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on the affective dimensions of intergenerational responsibility in the context of ecological crisis. My doctoral dissertation explores the possibility of feeling emotions toward future generations and, more broadly, the role that the sense of belonging to human continuity, as well as to a shared ecological niche, plays in our affective life. I am especially interested in how emotions shape our experience of temporal belonging and responsibility in relation to environmental challenges. I am currently an Honorary Fellow (“Cultore della Materia”) for the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind at the University of Pisa.

Isolde Gottwald is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Psychology Group at the University of Vienna, funded by the DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the potential of entertainment media for climate change communication, with a particular interest in the role of emotions. She completed her MSc in Psychology and an MA in Communication Science at the University of Vienna and spent a semester abroad at the University of Melbourne, where she developed a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches to environmental studies and science communication. Prior to this, she contributed to science communication efforts at Wissenschaft im Dialog in Berlin, Germany’s national organisation for science communication, and worked as a Project Associate on three Horizon Europe projects - TETTRIs, Skills4EOSC, and FAIRiCUBE - at the Natural History Museum Vienna from 2023 to 2025.

Manon Gouiran joined the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab in January 2025 as a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Tobias Brosch and Prof. Corinne Moser (FHNW). For the ENERGYPULSE project, she investigates Swiss citizen's cognitive and affective perceptions of energy prices, supply risks, and climate change. We are interested in how these perceptions change over time and affect decisions and environmental behaviors. The project will involve a communication intervention, resulting in a large-scale informed citizen panel. We will give neutral information to a portion of Swiss citizens and our research project will allow us to see how being informed affects perceptions and in turn, decisions and behaviors. In her previous work, she focused on moral decision-making, conceptions of critical thinking, and productivity. Outside of work, Manon enjoys archery and baking.

Hi everyone! I'm a PhD student at the Copernicus Institute at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and a documentary filmmaker. My research is part of the POTRANSI project, we explore power dynamics in transformative social innovation. In my PhD I look at the interaction of emotional dynamics and power dynamics in prefigurative movements such as initiatives working on participatory democracy, housing cooperatives, ecological communities and sharing economy. In the paper I'm currently developing I'm doing a relational literature review on power and emotions in transformation, exploring how academic and non-academic literature understand their relation. Ultimately, I am interested in how people can grow their critical emotional reflexivity to build more transformative power. In the project we work with participatory action research and art-based methods like Theatre of the Oppressed and photovoice, and I hope to bring in somatic practices too. Next to my PhD I co-produced the documentary Cost of Growth and setting up a non-profit focused on democratizing the economy.

I’m an environmental psychologist doing my PhD on eco-distress. My research looks at why people differ in how they experience eco-distress, using appraisal theory to understand how different appraisals are linked to different levels of eco-distress, such as negative emotions and impairment-related distress. I’m also interested in understanding how eco-distress differs across age groups, and why it seems to affect young people most strongly.

I am a PhD Fellow in Environmental Psychology at the University of Copenhagen's Center for Social Data Science (SODAS). I hold an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences from University College London (UCL) and an MA (Honours) in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews. My PhD research applies computational social science methods to study cross-cultural human-nature relationships, with a particular focus on the affective and social psychological dimensions. Using natural language processing and large-scale global data (collected from social media, panel studies, and surveys), I study cultural differences in sustainability perceptions and environmental behaviour. Ongoing projects include analyses of climate futures in 25 countries using affective valence scoring in multilevel models, examination of semantic human-nature associations across languages using word embeddings, and the relationship between dark personality traits, collectivism, and climate policy support.

I am a doctoral researcher at the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. My research focuses on the communication of energy and climate mitigation policies. I have conducted correlational studies comparing the predictive strength of predictors of policy support as well as experimental studies comparing the effects of different policy impact information on emotions and policy support. I am now focusing on investigating the effects of transparent communication on issue and affective polarization. In my work, I am using a range of methods such as machine-learning and multilevel models.

Thandi Lyew is a PhD candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research sits at the intersection of health and climate communication, learning and memory, and psychological well-being. She examines how individuals cope with uncertainty during public health and environmental crises like climate change and COVID-19. Her work focuses on how intolerance of uncertainty can shape emotional well-being and discourage constructive engagement with complex information. Building on this, she studies curiosity as an emotional mechanism that may help reduce uncertainty-related avoidance by making climate and health information more approachable, memorable, and socially transmissible. Through her research, she aims to inform communication strategies that advance public awareness,  and support broader efforts to improve health, sustainability, and climate action. Thandi holds an M.A. in Communication from University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Psychology from Florida International University.

My PhD research examines the emotional and cognitive barriers that prevent individuals from reducing unsustainable behaviors, as well as potential strategies to overcome them. Although many people express support for climate change mitigation, far fewer are willing to alter their own unsustainable habits or endorse sustainability policies that directly affect them. To better understand this gap between attitudes and actions, I investigate how factors such as the experience of loss, psychological reactance, perceived social norms, and behavioral control contribute to it. My approach integrates methods ranging from fMRI to computational language analysis.

I studied environmental and health sciences at AgroParisTech, a French engineering school, before completing a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science in Paris. Driven by my interest in how psychological processes shape environmental decisions, I joined the Consumer Decision & Sustainable Behavior Lab as a PhD student under the supervision of Tobias Brosch. My PhD research focuses on understanding how people value biodiversity and what motivates them to engage in pro-biodiversity behaviors. By identifying the psychological factors that influence biodiversity valuation and engagement, this work aims to develop and test evidence-based strategies to promote behavior change and strengthen public support for biodiversity policy.

Hi everyone, I'm Jean-Paul, a PhD student in Finance at the Geneva Finance Research Institute (GFRI) and CISA, University of Geneva. My research sits at the intersection of behavioral economics, affective science, and sustainability. I study how a sustainable mindset predicts cooperative resilience in Public Goods Games, specifically whether it buffers against defection under collective risk. Alongside this, I'm involved in a collaboration examining whether measurement coherence across economic preference domains holds when extended to social preferences, using large-scale datasets. What draws me to this summer school is a question central to my work: how do emotions mediate the gap between environmental values and cooperative behavior? Do people feel their way into sustainability, or does affect get in the way? Looking forward to learning from and sharing with everyone here.

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology, focusing on how people develop relationships with the natural world across the lifespan. I specifically examine how moral attitudes toward nature and pro-environmental behaviors develop, as well as how socio-ecological systems influence them. Currently, I am interested in examining the emotional frameworks that promote or hinder environmental attitudes, with a particular focus on eco-anxiety and its expression among children and adolescents in low-income communities. I am also interested in understanding the views of families and community members on youth’s eco-anxiety and the strategies they use to support them. Before my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, I was a Fulbright scholar from Colombia. I earned my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Boston University and hold a master’s degree in psychology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

I am a third-year PhD student in psychology at the University of Cambridge, where I am supervised by Prof. Sander van der Linden and funded by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Originally from Germany, I graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in experimental psychology before completing a master’s in environmental science at Yale University. There, I expanded upon my quantitative research background by using qualitative methodologies to study climate change misperceptions. As a PhD student, I have developed this line of inquiry by exploring misperceptions of the impacts of climate actions amongst climate-concerned individuals and how psychological interventions can be used to foster more impactful behaviour. Outside of research, I enjoy hiking, rock climbing, and choral singing.

My doctoral project is focused on understanding why people engage in climate activism and how they get active and maintain their engagement. I investigate the emotions of climate activists and people new to climate activism. I am also interested in repression, intersectionality, and care in social movements. My methods include systematic reviews, qualitative interviews, surveys, and Experience Sampling Methods. I am dedicated to critical participatory action research and co-creation approaches. For this reason, I am part of the Data Analysis and Insights Circle to collaborate and provide data analyses for the climate movement Extinction Rebellion. My supervisors are Dr Cameron Brick, Dr Nils Jostmann, and Dr Disa Sauter.

I am an incoming PhD candidate at UniDistance Suisse, starting on August 1st, 2026, under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Samson within the chEERS Lab. My research focuses on the role of emotions and emotion regulation in climate communication, with a particular emphasis on humor as a tool to address misinformation. Specifically, I investigate how humor can function as a cognitive and affective mechanism to reduce defensiveness, facilitate belief updating, and promote engagement with climate-related information. My work sits at the intersection of affective science, communication, and environmental psychology, combining experimental methods with theoretically grounded approaches to persuasion and behavior change. By examining both misinformation prevention (inoculation) and correction (debunking), my research aims to contribute to the development of evidence-based communication strategies that foster informed and adaptive responses to climate change.

I am an interdisciplinary social scientist grounded in emotional geography, social psychology, and feminist approaches to qualitative and quantitative climate action research. I focus on human responses to climate emotions and related influences on prosocial and pro-environmental behaviours and decision-making. I frame these actions as planetary care work; I examine the gender dynamics and social differences within, and motivations behind, engagement in both paid and unpaid forms. I seek to identify strategies to overcome social barriers to equitable climate action – from personal lifestyle to employment to end-of-life choices. My prior research focused on sociopsychological responses to water crisis communications containing fear and existential threats, leading to the co-development of the Terror Management Theory Climate Model. I currently investigate additional, positive emotions and their influence on planetary care work and interrogate how Western death denial/avoidance acts as a barrier to meaningful engagement in prosocial behaviours such as climate action.

Giulia Sonetti is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at ISGlobal (Barcelona Institute for Global Health) and visiting professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Her research explores the intersection of climate anxiety, emotional well-being, and sustainability education. Through her project Cycling2Care, she investigates how embodied, relational, and intergenerational experiences, such as nature-based volunteering and community care practices, can transform climate distress into agency and engagement. Her work integrates public health, environmental psychology, and transformative learning, with a focus on young adults. She is particularly interested in how inner dimensions (emotions, values, meaning-making) shape societal responses to the climate crisis and contribute to more just and sustainable futures.

I am Laetitia. I joined the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behaviour Lab and CISA at the end of 2025 as a PhD student. My research focuses on public engagement with biodiversity, addressing the research gap in the comprehensive understanding of the psychological factors that shape how individuals in Switzerland value and engage with biodiversity. At present, I am investigating cognitive, affective, and social drivers through a panel survey with the Swiss population in order to develop a corresponding psychological model. This model will then help me construct evidence-based interventions to increase knowledge about biodiversity, foster emotional and social engagement, and provide opportunities for action towards biodiversity conservation.

I am a PhD researcher in the Sinking Islands in Europe Research Project at the Department of Social Sciences at LUT University in Finland. I have a background in Cultural Anthropology and International Relations. My research examines perceptions and future imaginaries of sea-level rise and climate migration in European contexts. Over the past year, I have conducted qualitative fieldwork in Venice and on the Dutch Wadden Islands, interviewing residents, politicians, and experts, and migrants about how they understand and anticipate environmental transformations. I am particularly interested in how emotions underpin climate change imaginaries. In Venice and on the Dutch Wadden Islands, I am currently analyzing dominant storylines surrounding technocratic solutions to sea-level rise, paying close attention to their emotional dimensions and to the ways they generate both attachment and resistance. In my future work, I aim to investigate emotionally informed epistemic habits and epistemic conflicts between island communities and experts, exploring how divergent emotional investments shape disagreements about what is legitimate knowledge.

As a PhD student in the International Doctoral Program Um(welt)Denken at the University of Augsburg, based in Geography Education, my research focuses on how pre-service teachers can be prepared to engage with climate-related emotions in Education for Sustainable Development. Besides my academic training in Educational Science (B.A.) and Environmental Ethics (M.A.) at the University of Augsburg, I have worked in primary school contexts in previous years with a focus on social-emotional learning and completed additional training in adventure-based learning, both of which have strongly shaped my interest in the didactic integration of emotions. Personally, I feel strongly connected to nature, being fortunate to have grown up in southern Germany close to the Alps, and I still spend much of my time outdoors in the mountains.

Linli Zhou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in shaping individual and collective pro-environmental behaviors, such as sustainable consumption behaviors. Specifically, she examines (1) whether people feel good about themselves after engaging in pro-environmental actions, often referred to as “warm glow,” and (2) whether this feeling, in turn, motivates pro-environmental behavior over time. To address these questions, she employs a combination of methods, including surveys, quasi-experimental designs, and meta-analyses.