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It's common sense that winter's gloom can lower our spirits. But until now, little scientific evidence has supported the folklore. This ScienCentral News video has more.
Spring's the Thing
Blasts of bitter cold air to the face, mountains of snow and sneaky black ice put few people in a sunny mood. But surprisingly, the weather has little affect on people's overall state of mind, according to research that will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Three years ago, Matthew Keller, the lead author of the article, found himself in the doldrums of a Michigan winter. He was completing his graduate degree in psychology and spending most of his time working indoors. Any time he was able to escape, Old Man Winter offered a chilling embrace. Finally Keller chased away his winter blues with a trip to Mexico. "When I left Michigan to go to Mexico, I just felt like there was color in life again," he says.
When Keller returned that spring, he decided to test how the weather really affects people's mood and cognitive ability. He and his colleagues conducted three separate studies evaluating people's moods, memories and openness to new information. In the first of the three studies, nearly 100 volunteers filled out questionnaires reporting their general mood, the amount of time they spent outside that day, and their general activity level. The study's participants were also asked to perform two cognitive tests. The first tested volunteers' ability to listen to a string of numbers and accurately repeat them, while the second evaluated their willingness to change pre-established opinions after receiving new information regarding an issue or person. In all cases, higher scores indicated better moods and cognitive ability. Keller correlated this survey information with local weather data collected from the National Climatic Data Center.
"What we found was that people who were outside on nice sunny days tended to be in better moods, they tended to have better memory, and they tended to be more open to new information," says Keller, who is now a psychologist at UCLA's Center for Society and Genetics.
But Keller and his colleagues knew they needed to control for people's inherently cheery or sour dispositions as well as their activity levels. In a study of 120 paired participants, Keller randomly assigned people to one of three outdoor activities for 30 minutes while their partners spent the same time inside. Outdoor activities included walking around a track, walking through a garden, and meditating. The comparative indoor activities included dancing, walking on a treadmill, and proofreading a passage. The study showed that only five to 10 percent of everyday mood and cognition is explained by the weather. Keller says people did get a boost if they were outside in nice weather, but if they got stuck trudging through nasty weather, their mood and cognitive ability dropped.
In the final study, Keller spent a year surveying people across the United States and Canada, curious to see if his results were a local phenomenon. Keller saw a "casual" lift in people's mood and cognitive ability in the spring, but not in the summer, winter or fall. Keller believes this is because people are experiencing the greatest change in weather going from winter to spring.
"Weather is still a novelty in the spring, but by the summertime, the hundredth hot day, it probably isn't going to have the same psychological boosting effect that it does in the after a long winter," says Keller.
Keller's findings are consistent with the library of research on Seasonal Affective Disorder that associates improved moods and cognition with the arrival of spring. Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, is a diagnosed form of the winter blues that includes symptoms of depression, fatigue, and general lethargy as days become shorter in the winter. In 2001, according to National Mental Health Association, about 25% of Americans suffered from SAD.
Even though there are numerous factors that can affect an individual's mood, and weather is not one of the more prominent, Keller says the take home message for shedding the winter blues is obvious: "If it's a nice sunny day and it's springtime, make sure you go outside for at least 30 minutes."
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