![]() As the number of hours of sunshine increased, optimism scores also increased. The number of hours of sunshine was found to predict optimism scores significantly. Rising temperatures lowered anxiety and skepticism mood scores. ![]() High levels of humidity lowered scores on concentration while increasing reports of sleepiness. Humidity, temperature, and hours of sunshine had the greatest effect on mood. They found a significant effect on mood correlated with the weather, especially with regards to humidity (a component of weather not always measured): Howard and Hoffman (1984) had 24 college students keep track of their mood (by filling out a mood questionnaire) over 11 consecutive days. Other research paints a very different picture. But the researchers only examined depression, and didn’t measure how much time subjects spent outside (a factor that some have suggested might influence how much the weather impacts us). They found no correlation between depression and the time of the year, nor the amount of daily hours of sunshine. The researchers had patients fill out a depression questionnaire, and then analyzed the results. For instance, Hardt & Gerbershagen (1999) looked at 3,000 chronic pain patients who came to a hospital over a 5-year period. Some previous research confirms the blog entry’s conclusion that weather may have little effect on our moods. There’s a fair amount of research in this area (more than the 3 or 4 studies mentioned in the blog), and I think the overall preponderance of evidence suggests that weather can have more than just a “little effect” on your mood. I’m familiar with this area of research, so I found the entry’s conclusions a little simplistic and not really doing justice to this topic. The entry quotes almost exclusively and entirely from the one study. ![]() I was browsing a blog the other day and saw an undated (recent?) entry suggesting that research shows that “weather has little effect on our mood.” The entry relied heavily on a recent study (Denissen et al., 2008) that shows that although a correlation between mood and weather does exist, it’s a small one (not nearly as large as conventional wisdom might suggest).
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