Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Folke bomb here. Our collective imagination has
Speaker 1: a powerful association between rainfall and melancholy. We've come to
Speaker 1: assume that dark, cloudy skies and the drumbeat of raindrops
Speaker 1: on our windows make people feel sad and forlorn. Are
Speaker 1: only consolation being that the sun will come out again.
Speaker 1: But do rainy days really get us down? Science says
Speaker 1: yes and no. Research indicates that weather doesn't significantly affect
Speaker 1: mood for most people, although one study has suggested that
Speaker 1: a minority may indeed feel worse when it rains. We
Speaker 1: spoke by email with David Watson, the Andrew J. McKenna
Speaker 1: Family Professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame
Speaker 1: and author of the book Mood and Temperament, which describes
Speaker 1: his own research on rainfall and mood. He said, I
Speaker 1: think this popular belief, which I shared to some extent
Speaker 1: despite my own work in this area, represents what psychologists
Speaker 1: call a confirmation bias. For example, if I'm feeling down
Speaker 1: and look outside and see it raining, I may conclude
Speaker 1: that I'm feeling gloomy because it's raining. However, if I'm
Speaker 1: feeling down and look outside and see bright sunshine, I
Speaker 1: quickly conclude that it has nothing to do with the weather.
Speaker 1: So we tend to notice and remember those events that
Speaker 1: are consistent with our beliefs and expectations. In one study,
Speaker 1: for example, Watson and a colleague followed eighteen Japanese college
Speaker 1: students over a three month period in nineteen eighty, assessing
Speaker 1: their daily moods and correlating the ratings with weather summaries.
Speaker 1: To the researchers surprise, their analyzes of the data all
Speaker 1: demonstrated that the student's mood was unrelated to the weather.
Speaker 1: Watson subsequently gathered data from four hundred and seventy eight
Speaker 1: college students in Texas during various periods during the mid
Speaker 1: to late eighties and early nineties, which he again compared
Speaker 1: to weather records. The result essentially was the same. Even
Speaker 1: on days when it rained an inch or more about
Speaker 1: twenty five million liters and there was no more than
Speaker 1: ten percent possible sunshine, there seemed to be no significant
Speaker 1: effect on mood. Watson said, my research tried to tease
Speaker 1: apart various potential factors, such as the presence versus absence
Speaker 1: of rain and daylight versus cloudiness. These variables are confounded
Speaker 1: as it rarely rains when the sky is sunny. I
Speaker 1: really could not find much evidence that anything influenced people's mood.
Speaker 1: When I started this research, I was very concerned about
Speaker 1: being able to locate the source of any effects. For instance,
Speaker 1: if people feel blue on a rainy day, it could
Speaker 1: be the precipitation or the cloudiness, or the barometric pressure,
Speaker 1: or the fact that the rain restricts their activities and
Speaker 1: or makes them more stressful or less pleasant. However, I
Speaker 1: really found no evidence that people felt sad on rainy days,
Speaker 1: so none of these variables seems to be crucially important.
Speaker 1: Other studies seemed consistent with Watson's findings that whether isn't
Speaker 1: that potent of an influence on mood, though two studies
Speaker 1: suggest that rain may have some effect on a minority
Speaker 1: of individuals. A study by Bulgarian researchers published in twenty
Speaker 1: eleven in Advances in Science and Research found a negative
Speaker 1: effect on emotion when the skies suddenly changed to cloudy,
Speaker 1: but the impact varied. Emotionally stable people were more resistant
Speaker 1: to the influence of weather changes, while those who were
Speaker 1: emotionally unstable were more strongly dependent upon them. Another study
Speaker 1: of four hundred and ninety seven Dutch adolescence in their mothers,
Speaker 1: published in twenty eleven in the journal Emotion, found that
Speaker 1: forty seven point eight percent of the subjects were unaffected
Speaker 1: by the weather, that sixteen point eight percent were summer
Speaker 1: lovers who reacted positively to warm, sunny weather, that twenty
Speaker 1: six point eight percent were summer haters, and that eight
Speaker 1: point seven percent were rain haters, who were measurably angrier
Speaker 1: and less happy on days with more our precipitation. We
Speaker 1: also spoke by email with the lead author of the study,
Speaker 1: Theo Klimstra, an associate professor in the Department of Developmental
Speaker 1: Psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He said the
Speaker 1: group of rain haters was pretty small, but the summer
Speaker 1: lovers didn't like the rain either, so the total group
Speaker 1: of people who didn't like the rain was about of
Speaker 1: the sample. The main difference between the rain haters and
Speaker 1: summer lovers was that the rain haters didn't react as
Speaker 1: strongly to a lack of sun and low temperature as
Speaker 1: the summer lovers did, whereas summer lovers didn't react as
Speaker 1: strongly to the rain as the rain haters did. Klimstra
Speaker 1: said it was surprising that about the subjects weren't negatively
Speaker 1: affected by the rain. Quote. We examined whether the Big
Speaker 1: five traits openness, conscientiousness, extra version, agreeableness, and neuroticism were
Speaker 1: related to our weather types, but that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1: The most likely explanation is that people are just us
Speaker 1: bothered by rain than we like to believe. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Patrick J. Tiger and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other topics, visit
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