Does life seem better on a sunny day? Examining the association between daily weather conditions and life satisfaction judgments.

Abstract

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.

Increasing ambient temperature reduces emotional well-being

“…One study has found an impact of heat exposure on hospital admissions for mental and behavioral disorders (Hansen et al, 2008). Related research in psychology and economics has suggested that heat exposure reduces emotional wellbeing (Keller et al, 2005), increases interpersonal aggression (Anderson & Anderson, 1998;Anderson & Bushman, 2002) and diminishes life satisfaction (Connolly, 2013;Denissen, Butalid, Penke, & van Aken, 2008;Lucas & Lawless, 2013;Schwarz & Clore, 1983). Together, these findings indicate that heat exposure may adversely impact mental health and that global climate change, by increasing exposure to extreme heat, could similarly have negative consequences for mental health (Berry, Bowen, & Kjellstrom, 2010).…”

Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being

“…Respondents may thus base their answer on heuristics, their current mood and memory Schwarz and Strack 1999). The difficulty of investigating such effects is made obvious by Lucas and Lawless (2013), who note that while weather has often been found to affect the mood and life satisfaction of respondents, this may have been the result of different climates, or time of the year, as they find no effect of weather itself in a large scale study. In contrast to evaluative subjective well-being measures that require an evaluative judgment from respondents, experienced well-being measures focus on how respondents are feeling (positive and negative affect) at a specific point in time.…”

The Effect of Mood on Judgments of Subjective Well-Being: Nine Tests of the Judgment Model

“…For instance, Eid and Diener (2004) Finally, other attempts to examine the effects of mood on life satisfaction judgments by examining the association between specific contextual factors that are thought to be related to mood and global well-being judgments have also found weak effects. For example, Lucas and Lawless (2013) used data from over one million respondents who had been surveyed throughout the U.S. on different days over a four-year period. They linked these responses to the weather on the day of the survey, and they found no effect on life satisfaction, even with an extremely high degree of power.…”

“…Finally, Lucas and Lawless (2013) examined the link between weather and life satisfaction judgments (based on predictions from Schwarz and Clore, 1983) and in contrast to the original study, they found no association between weather and life satisfaction in a sample of over 1 million residents of the U.S. (also see Simonsohn, 2015a). Again, these more recent studies suggest that effect sizes are relatively small (at best) and that direct replications of the original judgment model studies are needed.…”