Recently an internal poll at Sky asked employees whether the weather affected your mood. Responders overwhelming said that it did.
However, this is people self-reporting in a poll. When you get into the science, the picture is far less clear.
The Huffington Post reported on all kinds of maladies that studies suggest are caused by weather. The list includes changes in empathy, violent crime and mental health problems.
In contrast, a 1998 study by David Shkade and Daniel Kahneman suggested that people’s hapiness was unaffected by weather. Their conclusion was clear: better climate does not make you happier. They conclude…
It is not unlikely that some people might actually move to California in the mistaken belief that this would make them happier. Our research suggests a moral, and a warning: Nothing that you focus on will make as much difference as you think.
The same BBC article also quotes a 2008 study by Jaap Denissen that concludes…
The idea that pleasant weather increases people’s positive mood in general is not supported by the findings of this study.
These findings cannot be generalised to everyone. Some people suffer from seasonal affective disorder. It comes with the acronym SAD, just like social anxiety disorder does, suggesting that mental health professionals would benefit from improved coordination.
Seasonal affective disorder is a genuine and widely-accepted condition and is one that should not be taken likely: it is a serious mental illness. However, it only accounts for a small amount of the population. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry puts the prevalence at 2.4% of the population.
So are the rest of us just imagining it?
Well, maybe. But a study by Klimstra et al. fought back. They suggested that some personalty types may be affected by weather while others may not be.
Their figures suggest that around half of people are unaffected by weather, while others are affected by summer, and by rain. They conclude…
Overall, the large individual differences in how people’s moods were affected by weather reconciles the discrepancy between the generally held beliefs that weather has a substantive effect on mood and findings from previous research indicating that effects of weather on mood are limited or absent.
So does weather affect your mood? Probably less than you think. But, as ever, more research is needed.
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Tags: climate, happiness, mood, psychology, weather
This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2016 at 10:38 am and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.