Theoretical Framework

The affective dimension captures emotional responses to collapse awareness—ranging from anxiety and fear to hope and equanimity. This dimension is grounded in Terror Management Theory (TMT), which explores how awareness of mortality influences attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Recent meta-analyses (2025) have refined TMT, identifying meaning-regulation and existential resilience as central adaptive responses. Rather than focusing solely on mortality-salience effects, current research emphasizes meaning-making and compassion as healthy responses to existential anxiety. Positive Psychology approaches complement TMT by highlighting how individuals can cultivate emotional resilience in the face of systemic uncertainty.

The cognitive dimension reflects awareness levels—how clearly individuals recognize and acknowledge collapse dynamics, from denial and minimization to full awareness. This dimension draws on Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger) and System Justification Theory (SJT).

Recent reassessments emphasize motivated reasoning under uncertainty: people justify existing systems not only to reduce cognitive tension but to maintain predictability and control in unstable environments. Cross-cultural research continues to explore how these mechanisms vary between individualist and collectivist societies, revealing complex interactions between cultural context and cognitive adaptation.

The relational dimension addresses whether individuals orient primarily as individuals or within collective identities—reflecting group belonging, social bonds, and communal resilience. This dimension integrates Social Identity Theory with the Cultural Theory of Risk.

A 2024 synthesis by Chassang and colleagues demonstrated that risk perception depends heavily on cultural values mediating dread, perceived benefits, and the number of people affected. Recent models explain how worldview alignment within social groups shapes both emotional and behavioral responses to hazards. Complementary 2025 research confirms that collective identity and belonging significantly influence resilience and adaptive action under systemic stress.

The temporal dimension captures time orientation—past, present, or future focus—and how this shapes responses to collapse. Grounded in Holling's Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy frameworks, this dimension views systemic change as cyclical rather than linear.

The Panarchy model (2025 applications) describes complex adaptive systems in terms of four phases: exploitation (r), conservation (K), release (ω), and reorganization (α)—working across nested temporal scales. These models provide predictive insight into collapse–renewal dynamics in socio-ecological and organizational contexts. The adaptive cycle increasingly informs sustainability science and anticipatory governance, emphasizing the critical role of temporal awareness in decision-making during systemic transitions.

The behavioral dimension reflects agency and coping strategies—one's sense of capacity to act and preferred approaches, from passive acceptance to active preparation. This dimension is grounded in Self-Efficacy Theory (Bandura) and contemporary Behavioral Adaptation research.

Recent empirical studies (Yaban et al., 2025) confirm that autonomous motivation and self-efficacy jointly foster resilience by supporting both persistence and adaptive disengagement when goals become unattainable. This dual function—balancing perseverance and flexibility—is now central to behavioral adaptation research. Parallel work in environmental psychology links response efficacy to climate risk adaptation, showing that personal and collective agency remain key predictors of proactive coping under systemic uncertainty.