Intolerance of uncertainty and climate change experience as driving forces of climate anxiety: Insights from a network perspective

Mouguiama-Daouda, Camille;McNally, Richard J.;Heeren, Alexandre
(2026) Journal of Anxiety Disorders — Vol. 118, p. 103114 (2026)

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Abstract
Recent evidence indicates that sizeable segments of the global population experience marked anxiety about climate change. Yet important questions remain about the psychological processes that sustain climate anxiety and about how this anxiety can translate into adaptive responses (i.e., pro-environmental behaviors) versus maladaptive outcomes (i.e., impairments in daily functioning). In the present study, we explicitly build on decades of basic research identifying intolerance of uncertainty—a dispositional difficulty in tolerating the unknown—as a decisive mechanism in the emergence and maintenance of anxiety-related dysfunction. Accordingly, we investigated how intolerance of uncertainty, the experience of climate change, and climate anxiety are interconnected, along with climate anxiety’s (mal)adaptive outcomes. We analyzed data from an international unselected sample (n = 728) using computational tools from the network analytical framework. Specifically, we estimated a Gaussian Graphical Model (GGM) to characterize the network’s structure, identify potential clusters of variables, and detect influential nodes, and we estimated a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to examine the probabilistic dependencies among variables. Our results indicate that both intolerance of uncertainty and the experience of climate change function as driving forces within the overall network structure.
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Mouguiama-Daouda, C., McNally, R. J., & Heeren, A. (2026). Intolerance of uncertainty and climate change experience as driving forces of climate anxiety: Insights from a network perspective. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 118, 103114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2026.103114 (Original work published 2026)