Singing in the Rain!

In light (actually, it's rather dark and wet outside) of Sydney's terrible weather today and the numerous negative comments I've read on Facebook, I have decided to add this lighter piece to my new blog.


The weather has long been held as a major contributing factor to human psychology on days like today. I thought I might just add a few short pieces of information from some studies that investigated this effect:

Sydney Morning Herald Report 23-11-201

• Performance on memory tasks peaks at 22°C and declined with warmer or cooler temperature (Allen & Fischer, 1978)
• High mood has been associated with a number of factors such as low levels of humidity (Sanders & Brizzolara, 1982), high levels of sunlight (Parrot & Sabini, 1990) and high temperature (Cunningham, 1979)
• High temperature is reliably associated with violent behavior (Anderson, 2001)
• High temperature and sunny weather is associated with increased mood as time spent outside increased (Keller et al., 2004)
• Improved working memory capacity is associated with high barometric pressure or sunny weather (Keller et al., 2004)
• Mood is also higher if you spent time outside on a clear, sunny and warm day (Keller et al., 2004)

The moral of the story is for the next few days (since the Sydney Morning Herald article says its going to be raining till Saturday), I would advise: don't attempt to study unless you can increase your room temperature to 20°-22°C; if your spouse or friend has a low mood it might be because of the weather and not whatever you just did to annoy them; don't piss a drunk off because they are more likely to be violent; spend some time inside with artificial light.

While not all the studies I have read show a conclusive and clear effect of weather on mood, those details that I have selectively presented show that weather can be a small factor involved with cognition and mood. Then again, I was only writing this post to create a lighter mood because looking outside doesn't make me feel that way at all.

The weather does give me a chance to sing this song:

Reference:

Allen, M.A., & Fischer, G.J. (1978). Ambient temperature effects on paired associate learning. Ergonomics, 21, 95-101

Anderson, C.A. (2001). Heat and violence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 33-38.

Cunningham, M.R. (1979). Weather, mood, and helping behavior: Quasi-experiments with the sunshine samaritan. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1947–1956.

Parrott, W.G., & Sabini, J. (1990). Mood and memory under natural conditions: Evidence for mood incongruent recall. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 321–336.

Sanders, J.L., & Brizzolara, M.S. (1982). Relationships between weather and mood. Journal of General Psychology, 107, 155–156.

Keller, M. C., Fredrickson, B. L., Ybarra, O., Coˆte´, S., Johnson, K., Mikels, J., et al. (2005). A warm heart and a clear head: The contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition. Psychological Science, 16, 724–731.

Wood, A. (2011, November 23). Wet until Saturday, weather bureau warns. Sydney Morning Herald.