CLIMATE BRAIN - Questionnaires, Tasks and the Neuroimaging Dataset

TL;DR

The CLIMATE BRAIN dataset provides questionnaire, behavioral, and fMRI data to study brain responses to climate change.

Contribution

It is the first publicly available multimodal dataset specifically designed to investigate human brain responses to climate change.

Findings

The dataset includes 160 participants with moderate climate change concern.

It contains validated questionnaires, emotional climate stories, and tasks measuring climate-related brain responses.

Technical validation confirms the dataset's effectiveness and image quality.

Abstract

Climate change threatens human populations and ecosystems worldwide. Neuroscience research on this topic is emerging, but validated questionnaires, stimuli, and fMRI tasks remain scarce. Here, we present the CLIMATE BRAIN dataset, a multimodal collection of questionnaire, behavioral, and neuroimaging data from 160 young, healthy Polish individuals. Designed to advance research on climate emotions and pro-environmental behavior, the dataset includes individuals with moderate climate change concern. Participants read anger and hope-evoking stories about climate change and made pro-environmental decisions. The dataset includes data from (1) various questionnaire measures, including the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE); (2) a neuroimaging task for measuring emotional reactions to standardized Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS); and (3) a neuroimaging task based on Carbon Emission Task (CET) to measure climate action-taking. For technical validation, we provide image quality metrics and show the evidence for the effectiveness of the tasks consistent with prior studies. To our knowledge, the proposed multimodal dataset is currently the only publicly available resource specifically designed to investigate human brain responses to climate change.

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