While it has long been believed in psychology that weather somehow influences human's mood, the debates have been going on for decades about how they are correlated. In this paper, we try to study this long-lasting topic by harnessing a new source of data compared from traditional psychological researches: Twitter. We analyze 2 years' twitter data collected by twitter API which amounts to @math of all postings and try to reveal the correlations between multiple dimensional structure of human mood with meteorological effects. Some of our findings confirm existing hypotheses, while others contradict them. We are hopeful that our approach, along with the new data source, can shed on the long-going debates on weather-mood correlation.
Despite the on-going debates in psychology, most physiologists believe that the weather indeed has significant influence on psychological processes based on strong physiological evidence. For example, @cite_10 spotted rising and dipping production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter in human central nervous system, which is generally thought to be a contributor to feelings of well-being and happiness, as sunlight increased or decreased. Another line of evidence is provided by population-wide behavior studies in social psychology. A good example is seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which refers to the mood disorder in which people who have normal mental health throughout most of the year experience depressive symptoms in the winter http: en.wikipedia.org wiki Seasonal_affective_disorder . Researchers suggest that exposure to sunlight would immediately improve mood and diminishes SAD @cite_35 @cite_10 @cite_55 @cite_8 and that rainy or cloudy days can aggravate the symptoms @cite_55 . Additionally, reliable and significant associations are found between weather and mood-related social behaviors. For example, low barometric pressure @cite_13 and more snow are evidently linked with higher suicide rates @cite_21 and high temperature is associated with violent behavior @cite_3 @cite_12 .
@cite_35 @cite_8 @cite_10 @cite_55 @cite_21 @cite_3 @cite_13 @cite_12
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Ten mood variables were related to eight weather variables in a multidimensional study. Data were collected from 24 male subjects over 11 consecutive days. The mood variables were as follows: concentration, cooperation, anxiety, potency, aggression, depression, sleepiness, scepticism, control, and optimism. The weather variables included: hours of sunshine, precipitation, temperature, wind direction, wind velocity, humidity, change in barometric pressure and absolute barometric pressure. Humidity, temperature and hours of sunshine had the greatest effect on mood. High levels of humidity lowered scores on concentration while increasing reports of sleepiness. Rising temperatures lowered anxiety and scepticism mood scores. Humidity was the most significant predictor in regression and canonical correlation analysis. Implications for school and office performance are discussed which highlight the importance of humidity as a weather variable. Summary Alterations in monoaminergic neurotransmission in the brain are thought to underlie seasonal variations in mood, behaviour, and affective disorders. We took blood samples from internal jugular veins in 101 healthy men, to assess the relation between concentration of serotonin metabolite in these samples and weather conditions and season. We showed that turnover of serotonin by the brain was lowest in winter (p=0·013). Moreover, the rate of production of serotonin by the brain was directly related to the prevailing duration of bright sunlight (r=0·294, p=0·010), and rose rapidly with increased luminosity. Our findings are further evidence for the notion that changes in release of serotonin by the brain underlie mood seasonality and seasonal affective disorder. Correlations were calculated between daily self-evaluated mood reports (4 reports day) of 10 student subjects and 10 meteorological-geophysical variables over a 90-day period. The variables included mean and or change measures of temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, sunshine hours, wind speeds and global geomagnetic activity. Multiple regression analyses indicated that the weather matrix used could account for not more than 35 of the mood variance on the day of the evaluation. Lag correlations over the previous week clearly indicated a greater number of significant correlations between mood reports and weather of the previous two days. The mean correlation coefficient was 0.27. In general, "lower moods" were associated with fewer sunshine hours, higher relative humidity, and smaller humidity variations than "higher moods". It was concluded that mood reports can show weak responsivity to antecedent weather fluctuations. Research has shown that greater degrees of sunshine experienced directly are associated with greater amounts of compliance and tipping. This paper describes two studies that investigated beliefs about sunshine and tipping. The studies were conducted at a casino hotel in Atlantic City; a male server who delivered food and drinks to guests' rooms acted as the confederate. In Study 1, the server reported to guests the actual sky conditions: sunny, partly sunny, cloudy, or rainy. Tip percentages increased linearly from the worst to the best conditions. Study 2 used an experimental design. The server informed guests that the weather was either warm and sunny, cold and sunny, warm and rainy, or cold and rainy. Guests were gullible because their rooms shielded them from the actual conditions. Belief in sunny skies produced greater tip percentages. The temperature belief manipulation had no effect. This research extended previous research by showing that beliefs about weather, in addition to actual weather, can affect behavior.