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

= 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.