Guided by the risk information-seeking and processing model, this study examines positive and negative affect separately in their influence on information-seeking intentions and avoidance through structural equation analyses. The highlight is that information avoidance seems to be driven by positive affect, while information seeking seems to be more heavily influenced by negative affect. Another interesting finding is that informational subjective norms are positively related to both seeking and avoidance, which suggests that one’s social environment has the potential to strongly influence the way he or she handles climate change information. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The appraisal tendency framework (ATF) suggests that discrete emotions mediate the relationship between cognitive appraisals and behaviors. Based on the ATF, this study analyzed and found that fear, anger, anxiety, disgust, and sadness were positively related to the US public’s risk perception about the Ebola outbreak. Fear was also found to inhibit the degree to which systematic processing of the relevant risk information influenced participants’ support for institutional mitigation measures such as sending more health professionals to help countries in West Africa deal with the Ebola outbreak. The result partially confirms the ATF and offers important practical implications in regard to the communication of emergent public health crises.

Anchored by construal level theory and appraisal theories of emotion, this study examines whether discrete emotions vary along with perceived psychological distance of climate change impacts. We found that reduced psychological distance perception led to an increase in concrete emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and guilt. In contrast, increased psychological distance perception led to an increase in hope—an abstract emotion. Compared to anger, anxiety, and hope, fear, guilt, and shame had more limited impact on climate mitigation action and policy support. Trait empathy moderated the effect of psychological distance manipulation on distance perception and emotions.

Young adults 19 through 24 years of age were among the populations that had the highest frequency of infection from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. However, over the 2009–2010 flu season, H1N1 vaccine uptake among college students nationwide was around 8%. To explore the social cognitive factors that influenced their intentions to get the H1N1 vaccine, this study compares the predictive power of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the health belief model (HBM), and an integrated model. The final model shows that several HBM variables influenced behavioral intentions through the TPB variables. The results suggest that even though the TPB seemed a superior model for behavior prediction, the addition of the HBM variables could inform future theory development by offering health-specific constructs that potentially enhance the predictive validity of TPB variables.