There have been numerous studies trying to correlate weather and mood. These regressions investigate relationships between temperature, rainfall, wind velocity, etc, and average mood. There have been interesting, and often contrasting results in the literature. However, the temperature, and the weather, are changing. A lot. What will these changes mean for your mood, and should you move to Kazakhstan?
Lots of studies have looked for the ‘sweet spot’ of temperature: the exact weather that results in the best average mood. Cunningham (1979) found that this sweet spot is around 19°C. This means that as the temperature moves away from this sweet spot, people become more upset. It must also be noted that these experiments have numerous controls, meaning this sweet spot only exists if everything else in the environment is the same. Intuitively, you may think that global warming will make everyone moodier then, as temperatures increases. But what about nations where the average temperature is below 19°? Taking as a given that temperatures will rise +- 3 degrees on average around the world due to global warming (a hopeful assumption), nations below 16°C would theoretically have an improved mood. These include northern Europe, North America and much of Asia
But before you start packing, there are some things to consider. Climate change is not just global warming, it’ll affect all the weather – increased floods, droughts, hurricanes and tsunamis – all the variables controlled for in these studies. Sure, you may be slightly happier there at 19°, but you will probably be a lot sadder if you’re dealing with worldwide food shortages, a record-breaking drought, or a category 5 hurricane that you never experienced before. That is why these studies fall short of being applied to climate change. Things are not going to stay the same, so they simply cannot be controlled for. Unfortunately, this means that not just the warmer nations will be affected, everyone will be.
There is another interesting study that has slightly more applicability. A study by Li, Wang & Hovy (2014) measuring the relationship between mood and weather through tweets provides some interesting insights. What this study measures is how mood changes as temperature changes. What it finds is that people are sensitive to change. Deviations from the average yearly temperature are experienced negatively, specifically with increased anger. This study also includes similar controls, although more extensive, which can be assumed to also exacerbate our mood as we experience more weather catastrophes. This means that with global warming and climate change, everyone is going to get angrier, and in hot places probably even angrier. If we could measure it, we probably would have already seen it, since we’ve already experienced global warming of more than 1°C. What are you supposed to do with this info, you ask? I don’t know, maybe try meditation?
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