Luisa Orrù

The climate change emergency is one of the most important challenges of our time, and its impact on mental health has been evident for years. It is very important for clinicians to delve deeper into these manifestations. There are a wide variety of constructs, symptoms, and scales to measure the impact of climate change on mental health. Eco-anxiety is one of the constructs that has specifically emerged, in association with worry, about the future. In mental health studies, it is important to explore the relationship between eco-anxiety and emotion regulation and how much this relationship leads to worry about the future in order to be able to offer clinical intervention recommendations. Indeed, the hypothesis of this study is that it is possible to develop worries about the future when symptoms of eco-anxiety and a poor ability to regulate emotions are present. Particularly, emotion dysregulation could increase eco-anxiety symptoms and generate worries about one’s own future. For this reason, we have chosen to explore the relationships between these three constructs with the use of a mediation analysis. For this research, 351 participants were recruited in Italy. The proposed mediation model highlighted the findings that emotion dysregulation was positively related with eco-anxiety and that eco-anxiety predicts worry about the future. An association between emotion dysregulation and worry about the future was present. Eco-anxiety appeared to be an important mediator between emotional dysregulation and worry about the future. Emotion regulation could play a pivotal role in addressing concerns about the future. These findings could pave the way for exploring new research avenues and potential clinical interventions.

Literature about global emergencies and their impact on people’s health underlines the need to improve the social cohesion of human community and the availability of tools to support people and foster community interactions. This paper illustrates research aimed at describing and measuring human interactions in the Veneto community and its changing during the COVID-19 pandemic. 50,000 text occurrences from social media and newspapers about these topics were analyzed between December 2021 and January 2022. People present themselves as members of different teams, pursuing conflicting aims, and attributing the decision-making responsibility of emergencies management exclusively to governments, without considering themselves as active parts of the community. This delegation process on citizens’ behalf can affect their health: by taking minor responsibility in handling the repercussions of these events on the community and by arguing over the most effective way to deal with them, they risk freezing and waiting for action by third parties, thus leaving mutual interactions and the promotion of their own health at a standstill. Local institutions can use these data to shape prevention policies to manage the community’s emergencies and use them as opportunities to promote public health.