Title: Effects of Weather on Human Emotions | HealthGuidance.org
Headings: Effects of Weather on Human Emotions
Effects of Weather on Human Emotions
Sunlight
Temperature
Sleep
Rain

Content: Effects of Weather on Human Emotions | HealthGuidance.org
updated on October 15, 2019
November 8, 2011
Psychology
Effects of Weather on Human Emotions
Stanley C Loewen
Many of us have moods that are changeable like the tides, and like the tides, for many of us those moods are dictated by many things including the weather. While you might think that you ‘just woke up on the wrong side of bed’ it may in fact be that there are other things at play here – diet, tiredness, weather and more. In fact you could probably go as far as to say that the side of bed that you got out of is unlikely to really have had much to do with your mood at all…
Weather is one particularly large indicator of how your mood is going to turn out for the day, and if you have ever thought that the weather seems to be an apt metaphor for your mood (a pathetic fallacy as it is known in literature) then most likely the link is there indeed but the correlation is actually working the other way around. Here we will look in more detail at how the weather can impact human emotion. Sunlight
The first and most well known way in which weather affects mood is in what is known as ‘seasonal affective disorder’ – abbreviated rather appropriately to ‘SAD’. This condition can also be known as ‘winter depression’, ‘winter blues’ or ‘seasonal depression’ and basically it describes a condition in which the individual finds their mood so tied to the changing of the seasons that they in fact exhibit symptoms close to depression every winter. This condition is recognized in the ‘DSM-IV’ – the ‘Diagnostics and Statistical Manual’ used by psychologists where it is described as a ‘specifier of major depression’. There are various explanations as to why someone might experience SAD, but generally it is believed to relate to the amount of light. This then means that it is not in fact the cold of winter that causes the depression, but rather the lack of light getting into your brain. When we stand outside in the sun we tend to absorb light through the thin parts of our skulls and this helps to dictate our circadian rhythms (our body clock).