Which Negative Emotions Drive Preventive Behaviors? Comparing Emotion Conceptualizations and Their Conditional Effects Across Health and Environmental Risk

Negative emotions are widely recognized as central drivers of preventive behavior in health and risk research, yet it remains unresolved which conceptualization offers the greatest explanation for preventive behaviors, whether conceptualization choices alter conclusions about how cognitive risk perception and cultural context condition emotion-prevention associations, and whether such conclusions extend beyond health-risk settings. Using cross-sectional surveys from five regions during COVID-19 (N = 7,207) and linear mixed models, we compare a valence-based general negative emotion measure with an appraisal-based emotion that distinguishes loss-based emotions (e.g., fear, worry) from ethics-based emotions (e.g., anger, disgust), test moderation by cognitive risk perception and macro-level individualism, and then apply the same framework to an environmental risk context (2023 nuclear wastewater; N = 5,531) to assess cross-risk generalizability. Results show that, in COVID-19, appraisal-based emotions outperform general negative emotions in predicting preventive behaviors, with loss-based emotions exhibiting stronger positive associations than ethics-based emotions. Moderation inferences are largely invariant across conceptualizations: cognitive risk perception does not moderate the emotion-preventive behavior associations, whereas macro-level individualism strengthens the association under both conceptualizations. In the environmental-risk context, general negative emotion promotes behavior; however, loss- and ethics-based emotions are not empirically separable, suggesting a boundary condition for the appraisal-based approach.