ABSTRACT
Environmental education can effectively raise people's awareness of environmental protection and encourage appropriate behaviors. This study explored the effect of narrative-based environmental education on children's environmental awareness. To this end, we recruited first- and second-grade students from two elementary schools to participate in an experiment in which differences between the group receiving narrative-based environmental video education and the control group were compared. It was found that narrative-based environmental education can effectively promote children's environmental awareness, which was mainly reflected in their environmental knowledge and environmental attitudes, however, not significant in their pro-environmental behavior intention. These findings support the implementation of environmental education for students in lower grades in the future.
Subject(s)
Schools , Students , Attitude , Child , Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice , Humans , Intention , NarrationABSTRACT
The global illegal wildlife trade directly threatens biodiversity and leads to disease outbreaks and epidemics. In order to avoid the loss of endangered species and ensure public health security, it is necessary to intervene in illegal wildlife trade and promote public awareness of the need for wildlife conservation. Anthropomorphism is a basic and common psychological process in humans that plays a crucial role in determining how a person interacts with other non-human agents. Previous research indicates that anthropomorphizing nature entities through metaphors could increase individual behavioral intention of wildlife conservation. However, relatively little is known about the mechanism by which anthropomorphism influences behavioral intention and whether social context affects the effect of anthropomorphism. This research investigated the impact of negative emotions associated with a pandemic situation on the effectiveness of anthropomorphic strategies for wildlife conservation across two experimental studies. Experiment 1 recruited 245 college students online and asked them to read a combination of texts and pictures as anthropomorphic materials. The results indicated that anthropomorphic materials could increase participants' empathy and decrease their wildlife product consumption intention. Experiment 2 recruited 140 college students online and they were required to read the same materials as experiment 1 after watching a video related to epidemics. The results showed that the effect of wildlife anthropomorphization vanished if participants' negative emotion was aroused by the video. The present research provides experimental evidence that anthropomorphic strategies would be useful for boosting public support for wildlife conservation. However, policymakers and conservation organizations must be careful about the negative effects of the pandemic context, as the negative emotions produced by it seems to weaken the effectiveness of anthropomorphic strategies.