The effects of weather on mood
— I hate snow days
I have been in Montreal for 4 and half years already. I love all the unique characteristics of the city except one thing — the endless snow days in winter! It is not the snow that bothers me, it’s the things that come with snow — the ‘minus 20 something’ degrees, the icy road, the chill wind, and the fact that it’s probably much faster to ski or skate to classes than walking. Because of all these, I feel like that I become more easily depressed during Montreal’s winter. I believe that I am not the only one who sometimes change my plan of the day just because of the weather’s influence on my mood. Therefore, I did my research online and found one interesting study which may explain something.
In the study, Denissen et al. (2008) tried to figure out the effects of weather on daily mood. Since there are countless words that refer to mood, the researchers classified the mood into three categories — positive affect, negative affect, and tiredness. They also picked six weather parameters — temperature, wind power, sunlight, precipitation, air pressure, and photoperiod. They collected the mood data by asking the participants to fill out the daily questionnaires, and the weather data from the German Weather Institute (Deutscher Wetterdienst).
By analyzing the collected data, the researchers found that there is no significant main effects of the weather on positive affect. However, their findings suggest that “the direction and the strength of the association between weather and positive affect differed between individuals”. For negative affect, they found a significant positive main effect of temperature and negative effects of wind power and sunlight. They also found a significant negative main effect of sunlight on tiredness.
These findings actually contradict with what I experienced. Nevertheless, the researchers also concluded that there are individual differences in the effect of weather on mood (in both direction and strength). I guess I’m just different than the average experience of the participants in this study. Hopefully people can figure out a way to know the different influences of weather on mood in the future. In that case, at least we would able to find out the best day for dating!
Student ID: 260415310
Reference:
Denissen, J.J.A.; Butalid, Ligaya; Penke, Lars; van Aken, Marcel A. G. (2008). The effects of weather on daily mood: A multilevel approach. Emotion, 8(5), 662–667.
