A number of previous studies have indicated that market and population well-being are related. Using UK-biobank data we first identified a significant association between a local stock market index (FTSE100) and mood of 479,791 subjects and demonstrated that FTSE100 exhibits significant associations with volumetric measures of the brain regions involved in affective processing in 39,755 subjects with more distant markets exhibiting a weaker relation to these regions. These effects were primarily observed in the low-frequency band and were magnified over larger time-scales. The main results survived adjustments for seasonal effects, demographic confounders and effects of non-UK markets. The magnitude of these associations was also related to the strength of UK’s social and economic ties to other countries. Finally, the main finding was replicated in an independent set of individuals from a different country. After identifying scale-free properties in the stock market time-series, we show that 1/f pink noise explains a large proportion of the market-brain variance. However, all results withstood the adjustment for the scale-free noise. Taken together, our results suggest how global dynamics in the society generalise to population mood and large-scale biological data.
Temporal stock market dynamics are related to fluctuations in population mood and brain morphometry