Weather conditions have been shown to affect a broad range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The current study examines whether these effects extend to life satisfaction judgments. We examine the association between daily weather conditions and life satisfaction in a representative sample of over 1 million Americans from all 50 states who were assessed (in a cross-sectional design) over a 5-year period. Most daily weather conditions were unrelated to life satisfaction judgments, and those effects that were significant reflect very small effects that were only detectable because of the extremely high power of these analyses. These results show that weather does not reliably affect judgments of life satisfaction.
Subjective well-being (SWB) is a broad construct that is thought to reflect the quality of a person's life from his or her own perspective (Diener, Lucas, Schimmack, & Helliwell, 2009;Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). This construct can be assessed in a variety of ways, including through self-reports of affective experiences, through more explicit judgments about the conditions in a person's life (including judgments of life satisfaction), and even through non-self-report measures such as reports made by close informants (Schneider & Schimmack, 2009). The overarching goal of such assessment strategies is to determine whether the person finds life to be enjoyable, rewarding, and positive overall.Researchers assess well-being for a number of reasons. For instance, initial investigations into the construct were conducted with the goal of identifying basic human needs (Wilson, 1967). If certain characteristics are reliably correlated with well-being, then these characteristics might reflect
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