November 9, 2014

Does weather affect our mood?

I decided this week to observe what the weather makes myself and others feel like. Do our attitudes change when the weather changes without us realizing it? I will keep a close eye on how I and other people feel throughout the week. This experiment will be from Monday November 3rd to Friday November 7th.

Most days of the week in fall start off kind of cold being around 65 degrees. Cold weather to me makes me feel calm as long as I have some type of warmth that can make me feel secure. Without this warmth and security, I feel awake and full of energy like if someone dumped ice cold water on me. Afterwards, when I got to school I started to observe the people around me. Most of them were wearing jackets and sweaters, probably also looking for that warmth and security I like. A thing I noticed was that the people with some type of warmth were calm and still sleepy from waking up early and the people with only a t-shirt were moving a lot trying to keep warm.

In the afternoons, when the sun comes up during fall it still gets hot but not as hot as summer. By this time most people don't have their jackets or sweaters anymore and everyone looks more relaxed and outgoing. I also felt more outgoing, probably because that warmth was everywhere. If I compare the cold to the heat more people act like themselves when they feel like the weather is right, and that right weather is usually above 80 degrees. 

Now back to my question, does weather affect our mood? After doing my experiment, I don't feel like I know the answer because I only observed people in two different climates, hot and cold. As a result I went online and tried to find the answer. I came up on a certain website where they did a experiment on personality types and weather.

"The Impact of Weather May Depend On Your Weather Personality Type"

• "Summer lovers (17 percent) – Happier, less fearful, and less angry on days with more sunshine and higher temperatures. More hours of precipitation was associated with less happiness and more anxiety and anger.”
• "Summer haters (27 percent) – Less happy and more fearful and angry when the temperature and the percentage of sunshine were higher. With more hours of precipitation they tended to be happier and less fearful and angry.”
• "Rain haters (9 percent) – Angrier and less happy on days with more precipitation. By comparison, they were more happy and fearful, but less angry, on days with more sunshine and higher temperatures.”
• "Unaffected by weather (48 percent) – Largely unimpacted by changes in the weather."

As you can see, there are people who act differently in different weather and climate conditions. The majority doesn't really care about the weather, but for some people weather is a huge factor that controls your mood.

Work cited:

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/08/29/can-weather-affect-your-mood/