Weather impacts expressed sentiment
This research addresses the impact of weather on public mood for social scientists and policymakers, though it is incremental as it builds on prior studies with a larger dataset.
The study tackled the problem of how weather conditions affect human sentiment by analyzing over 3.5 billion social media posts from 2009 to 2016, finding that factors like cold and hot temperatures, precipitation, and cloud cover are associated with worsened sentiment, with effect sizes comparable to notable historical events.
We conduct the largest ever investigation into the relationship between meteorological conditions and the sentiment of human expressions. To do this, we employ over three and a half billion social media posts from tens of millions of individuals from both Facebook and Twitter between 2009 and 2016. We find that cold temperatures, hot temperatures, precipitation, narrower daily temperature ranges, humidity, and cloud cover are all associated with worsened expressions of sentiment, even when excluding weather-related posts. We compare the magnitude of our estimates with the effect sizes associated with notable historical events occurring within our data.