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Articles Cited-
Many studies have been conducted on the effects that weather has on our everyday moods. It seems like all of the studies done show some similarities and some dissimilarities to the point that it is hard to differentiate. Our group has reviewed many articles that have useful information related to our topic. Some of these articles lead us into the right direction while others had no real relevance to our lab at all. Here are the ones that we will use for future references.
The first article that we reviewed was entitled "No changes in mood with the seasons" and was written by J. Hardt. Hardt discusses the fact that women under the age of 51 are more often affected by seasonal affective disorders, but in his study this fact was not true. He did an experiment that lasted a five-year period on patients in a pain clinic in Germany. After analyzing his data, Hardt came to the conclusion that the amount of sunlight in a day and even the change in the seasons had little if any affect on depression. They go on to say that they believe that seasonal affective disorder, as a true disorder is probably rare.
"The origin of everyday moods: Managing energy, tension, and stress" written by Robert Thayer is our second source that discusses the behaviors that we all face each day and how they affect our mood. Thayer argues that we need to learn to see our moods as "vital barometers" of our whole psychology so that we can improve our personal effectiveness. With the improvements that we need to learn we can improve ourselves not only mentally, but also physically. Although weather is not mentioned as an individual factor, time of day, health, and food we eat, and the amount of sleep we get each night are.
Most of the articles that we reviewed involved studies that dealt either with mood, weather, or both. "Mental health, mood and perceptual responses to meteorological conditions" is just another article that discusses with us the affects that weather really does have on weather. Kenneth Cyr used his extensive knowledge and research on the topic to combine findings of others to form a more comprehensive viewpoint. Cyr takes not only qualitative research but also quantitative research and analyses both sides and comes up with his own perspective. The use of summary tables, scatter grams, histograms and clinical analysis were very important in his work because he used many different categories. For example, Cyr broke weather up into wind, heat, sun, rain, clouds, cold, storms, snow, thunder, fog, ice, mist, dew, hail, and humidity. Results showed that humans respond to conditions in the weather with immediate responses, such as fear or amazement, with associations to their past history, such as a particular stress related event.
Seasonal affective disorder was a diagnosis that was found in many of our articles. "Effect of daily variation in weather and sleep on seasonal affective disorder" written by Paul Albert was no different. The effects on sleep and weather differed in this study. When the ten patients were held in a controlled environment, all ten showed significant seasonal patterns in their sleep. On the other hand, only four of the ten subjects showed significant effects to their condition when weather was the control. Albert's results also dealt with energy, but the results were not relevant to our particular study at this time.
Some of the articles dealt with the actual reactions of people in real life situations, and not just those in a controlled environment. Ross Vickers wrote about this in his article entitled "Coping strategies and mood during cold weather training." In this experiment Vickers compared two different groups of Marines after their training. Both groups had two different training sessions, one during the cold winter months and the other session was held during the summer in the mountains for warfare training. What they found was that the Marines used other means of coping in the cold winter months such as thinking of warmer, better places. This led to negative emotions and moods during these time periods because they were forcing themselves to think of other things. During the summer training the group found that since the weather was nicer and easier to cope with that they tended to have better interactions and the overall mood was not as negative.
Vickers wasn't the only person who decided to do studies on soldiers. Richard Johnson also wrote an article entitled "Influence of attitude and expectations on moods and symptoms during cold weather military training" that focused not only on weather but also on the influences of everyday life. Johnson looked at soldiers that were training in cold weather and came to find that the more the soldiers disliked cold weather the more tense they were, depressed, angry, and depressed. This is a slightly different perspective than others have because the direct correlation between mood and weather is not the main factor here. Although the colder the weather the higher the symptoms in most soldiers, they also found that if the soldieries were more inclined to the colder weather than others that their symptoms were substantially lower than other soldiers. Johnson also contributed a great deal to the individuals' lives outside of the military. Those with the most stress in their lives at that particular time showed an increase in the overall poor characteristics that dealt with mood.
While a lot of professionals like to examine the mood of individuals during certain weather patterns, Detlev Kommer decided to see if he could manipulate mood by controlling the weather. Detlev controlled his experiment basically the same way that our group will hold ours. The way he did this was that he picked when he wanted his subjects to fill out his questionnaires. Some of the subjects were asked to give their responses on days that it was extremely sunny and nice outside, while at other times the subjects were asked to answer the same questions on gloomy, overcast days. Many questions were asked, such as how satisfied they were with their life and how they expected their future to unfold. Although Detlev got very detailed in his questions and observations, his ideas are very similar to ours.
Sometimes it is important to continue a study for a set time period to reduce the outside influences. E. Howarth did this when he conducted a study of 24 male university students over an eleven-day period. Included in this study were 10 mood variables, such as anxiety, potency, aggression, and others. The weather variables were hours of sunshine, precipitation, temperature, and others. Howarth found that the major influences on mood were humidity, temperature, and hours of sunshine. Although all of the other variables had influences on particular aspect of mood, these had the greatest overall affect.
Evaluating the results of an experiment can vary greatly between different individuals. A great example of that is the results that Persinger and Levesque reported in their study entitled "The weather matrix accommodates large portions of variance of measured daily mood." Basically what these two did was take the results of a previous experiment and use regression lag analysis to interpret the results in a more numeric manner. What they found was that four to five major components of the weather matrix accommodated approximately 30 - 60% of the variance in daily mood for the individuals involved in the experiment. They also ruled out some of the weather variables, such as temperature, because of outside contaminants.
Jeffery Sanders of Towson State University conducted his experiment every weekday morning for 5 straight weeks. His test was very simple, just a check list, and required very little thought from his respondents. After collecting all the data needed from the survey he then collected weather information from the National Weather Service for those time periods and compared the results. What he found was that the major weather factor was high humidity and that it correlated most consistently with vigor, social affection, and elation.
There are hundreds of articles that are relevant to our particular lab experiment. Some offers more help than others do because their focus seems to share a great deal with ours. Others have very little, if anything, to do with our experiment but still offer some advice as to how to get started and how to conduct certain experiments that are relevant.
Materials and Methods
To conduct our experiment we are going to use a survey. We will give the surveys out six times to forty people each time. We will use the same forty people the duration of the experiment to ensure consistency. Each member of our lab group will be in charge of finding ten people to conduct the experiment on. We will be in charge our own ten people. Forty people are being surveyed because we wanted to plan for people who might drop out and for people who were having many problems. Our target number of participants is thirty. We will attempt to get students from all over Miami's campus in order to get an accurate representative of the population. Because of the number of people being surveyed our data will be statistically sound. To try and remove bias from the experiment we will not inform the people of the experiment being preformed. They will be given no other directions or information than that they need to fill out the survey. We will dispense and collect the surveys the same day, within a few minutes of each other. The surveys will be given out at evenly spaced intervals between the end of October and the end of November. The only materials needed to conduct this experiment are the survey, participants, a calculator, and something to organize the data on.
A draft of our survey follows-
Name:
Year:
Gender:
Major:
1. Would you say you are a generally pessimistic or optimistic person? (circle one)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Pessimistic Optimistic
2. On average, how many hours do you spend outside per day?
<1 1-2 2-3 3-4 4-5 >5
3. In general, rate your stress level
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Low Stress High Stress
4. Today, what is your stress level?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Low Stress High Stress
5. What words would you use to describe your mood today? (circle all that apply)
Stressed Carefree Anxious Happy Depressed Content
With our results we are going to make charts and graphs that will show the results clearly. We will create a bar graph with rainy, sunny cloudy, cool, and hot days and show the number of people who rated themselves 6 or above on the stress level scale. This will allow us to be able to understand our data better to tell if good weather makes a difference on people's moods.
We are also going to make a chart showing the percentage of people scoring a six or above on sunny days. Then we'll make the same chart except for on days with rain. We will make another chart for days that are cloudy, using the average of people who rate themselves a six or above.
We will be looking for a correlation between better moods and increased sunlight and less clouds and precipitation.
Works Cited
Albert, Paul S.; Rosen, Leora
N.; Alexander, Joseph R.; Rosenthal, Norman E.
Psychiatry Research Vol 36(1)1991 p.51-63 Elsevier
Scientific Publishers, US
Cunningham, Michael R. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology
Vol 37(11)1979 p.1947-1956 American Psychological Assn.,
US
Cyr, Kenneth A. Dissertation
Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences &
Engineering Vol 56(2-B)1995 p.1088 Univ. Microfilms
International, US
Hardt, J.; Gerbershagen,
H. U. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Vol 100(4)1999
p.288-294 Munksgaard Scientific Journals, US
Howarth, E.; Hoffman, M.
S. British Journal of Psychology Vol 75(1)1984 p.15-23
British Psychological Society, England
Johnson, Richard F.; Branch, Laurence G.; McMenemy,
Donna J. Aviation, Space, & Environmental Medicine Vol
60(12)1989 p.1157-1162 Aerospace Medical Assn, US
Kommer, Detlev; Schwarz, Norbert; Strack, Fritz; Bechtel, Gabriele
Zeitschrift fuer Klinische Psychologie, Psychiatrie und
Psychotherapie Vol 34(2)1986 p.127-139 Verlag Ferdinand
Schoningh, Germany
Thayer, Robert E. 1996 Oxford
University Press, New York, NY, US x, 276pp.
Persinger, M. A.;
Levesque, B. F. Perceptual & Motor Skills Vol 57(3, Pt
1)1983 p.868-870 Perceptual & Motor Skills, US
Sanders, Jeffrey L.; Brizzolara, Mary S. Journal of General
Psychology Vol 107(1)1982 p.155-156 Heldref
Publications, US
Vickers, Ross R.; Kolar, David W.; Kelleher,
Dennis L. US Naval Health Research Center Report Rpt
No 89-471989 US Naval Health Research Center, US 14pp.
Whitton, Joel L.;
Kramer, Patricia M.; Eastwood, M. Robin Journal of
Psychosomatic Research Vol 26(2)1982 p.231-235 Elsevier
Science Inc., US
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