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.

Storytelling is a human universal. The ubiquity of stories and the rapid development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose important questions: can AI like ChatGPT tell engaging and persuasive stories? If so, what makes a narrative engaging and persuasive? Three pre-registered experiments comparing human-generated narratives from existing research and the ChatGPT-generated versions using descriptions and materials from these studies show that labeling AI as a narrative source led to lower transportation, higher counterarguing, and lower story-consistent beliefs. However, AI-generated narratives led to lower (Study 1 and 3) or similar levels (Study 2) of counterarguing than the human-generated version. Readers showed lower (Study 2) or similar levels of transportation (Study 1 and 3) when reading the AI- than the human-generated stories. We suggest the AI model’s linguistic competence and logical coherence contribute to its stories’ verisimilitude. However, AI’s lack of lived experience and creativity may limit its storytelling ability.