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