Weather impacts expressed sentiment
Open accessAbstract
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.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Extreme heat can affect human mental health outcomes across a continuum of severity, from subclinical to life-altering.
“Extreme heat can affect human mental health outcomes across a continuum of severity, from subclinical to life-altering.102,142–147”
From The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: facing record-breaking threats from delayed action (2024) · cites this paper as [147]
The Results (All expressed sentiment; page unavailable) report that positive expressions decline at temperatures above 30°C, supporting an association between heat and a subclinical measure of mood. The Discussion (page unavailable) cautions that expressed sentiment is only a possible proxy for underlying emotions. The paper does not establish life-altering mental health outcomes or a continuum of severity. (LLM, conf=0.88)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods
Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2010) · Journal of Language and Social Psychology · doi:10.1177/0261927x09351676 · Cited by 5,774 · see citing works
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.513 · Cited by 4,952 · see citing works
Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering
Cameron, A. C., Gelbach, J. B., & Miller, D. L. (2011) · Journal of Business & Economic Statistics · doi:10.1198/jbes.2010.07136 · Cited by 3,203 · see citing works
Sentiment strength detection in short informal text
Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., & Kappas, A. (2010) · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.21416 · Cited by 1,449 · see citing works
Diurnal and seasonal mood vary with work, sleep, and daylength across diverse cultures
Golder, S. A., & Macy, M. W. (2011) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1202775 · Cited by 1,155 · cited 1× · see citing works
“LIWC is a highly validated, dictionary-based, sentiment classification tool that is commonly used to assess sentiment in social media posts [5,6,23,24] (of note, our results are similar under the use of alternative sentiment classifiers).”
ResultTemperature and the Allocation of Time: Implications for Climate Change
Graff Zivin, J., & Neidell, M. (2014) · Journal of Labor Economics · doi:10.1086/671766 · Cited by 1,024 · see citing works
Positive Affect and Psychobiological Processes Relevant to Health
Steptoe, A., Dockray, S., & Wardle, J. (2009) · Journal of Personality · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2009.00599.x · Cited by 520 · see citing works
Climate change may alter human physical activity patterns
Obradovich, N., & Fowler, J. H. (2017) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0097 · Cited by 221 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 28
- [1]Steptoe A, Wardle J, Marmot M. Positive affect and health-related neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and inflammatory processes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Acad Sciences; 2005; 102: 6508– 6512. PMC1088362 15840727
- [2]Nadler RT, Rabi R, Minda JP. Better mood and better performance learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science. Sage Publications; 2010; 21: 1770– 1776. doi: 10.1177/0956797610387441 20974709 · DOI
- [4]De Neve J-E, Oswald AJ. Estimating the influence of life satisfaction and positive affect on later income using sibling fixed effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Acad Sciences; 2012; 109: 19953– 19958. PMC3523830 23169627
- [5]Coviello L, Sohn Y, Kramer AD, Marlow C, Franceschetti M, Christakis NA, et al Detecting emotional contagion in massive social networks. PLOS ONE. Public Library of Science; 2014; 9: e90315 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090315 24621792 PMC3951248 · DOI
- [6]Kramer AD, Guillory JE, Hancock JT. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Acad Sciences; 2014; 201320040. PMC4066473 24889601
- [7]Persinger M. Lag responses in mood reports to changes in the weather matrix. International Journal of Biometeorology. Springer; 1975; 19: 108– 114. 1165123
- [9]Denissen JJ, Butalid L, Penke L, Van Aken MA. The effects of weather on daily mood: A multilevel approach. Emotion. American Psychological Association; 2008; 8: 662 doi: 10.1037/a0013497 18837616 · DOI
- [10]Lucas RE, Lawless NM. Does life seem better on a sunny day? Examining the association between daily weather conditions and life satisfaction judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association; 2013; 104: 872 doi: 10.1037/a0032124 23607534 PMC3695376 · DOI
- [11]Li J, Wang X, Hovy E. What a nasty day: Exploring mood-weather relationship from Twitter. ACM; 2014; 1309– 1318.
- [12]Klimstra TA, Frijns T, Keijsers L, Denissen JJ, Raaijmakers QA, Aken MA van, et al Come rain or come shine: Individual differences in how weather affects mood. Emotion. American Psychological Association; 2011; 11: 1495 doi: 10.1037/a0024649 21842988 · DOI
- [13]Connolly M. Some like it mild and not too wet: The influence of weather on subjective well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies. Springer; 2013; 14: 457– 473.
- [15]Keller MC, Fredrickson BL, Ybarra O, Côté S, Johnson K, Mikels J, et al A warm heart and a clear head the contingent effects of weather on mood and cognition. Psychological Science. SAGE Publications; 2005; 16: 724– 731. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01602.x 16137259 · DOI
- [16]Feddersen J, Metcalfe R, Wooden M. Subjective wellbeing: Why weather matters. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society). Wiley Online Library; 2016; 179: 203– 228.
- [17]Settanni M, Marengo D. Sharing feelings online: Studying emotional well-being via automated text analysis of Facebook posts. Frontiers in Psychology. Frontiers Media SA; 2015; 6. PMC4512028 26257692
- [20]Di Luzio M, Johnson GL, Daly C, Eischeid JK, Arnold JG. Constructing retrospective gridded daily precipitation and temperature datasets for the conterminous United States. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. 2008; 47: 475– 497.
- [21]Kanamitsu M, Ebisuzaki W, Woollen J, Yang S-K, Hnilo J, Fiorino M, et al NCEP–DOE AMIP-II reanalysis (R-2). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 2002; 83.
- [25]Watson D, Clark LA, Tellegen A. Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association; 1988; 54: 1063 3397865
- [27]Obradovich N. Climate change may speed democratic turnover. Climatic Change. Springer Netherlands; 2017; 140: 135– 147.
- [29]Wooldridge JM. Econometric analysis of cross section and panel data MIT press; 2010.
- [30]Hsiang S. Climate econometrics. Annual Review of Resource Economics. 2016; 8: 43– 75.
- [32]Obradovich N, Migliorini R, Mednick SC, Fowler JH. Nighttime temperature and human sleep loss in a changing climate. Science Advances. American Association for the Advancement of Science; 2017; 3: e1601555 doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1601555 28560320 PMC5446217 · DOI · Paper page
- [34]Dodds PS, Clark EM, Desu S, Frank MR, Reagan AJ, Williams JR, et al Human language reveals a universal positivity bias. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Acad Sciences; 2015; 112: 2389– 2394. PMC4345622 25675475
- [35]Dodds PS, Harris KD, Kloumann IM, Bliss CA, Danforth CM. Temporal patterns of happiness and information in a global social network: Hedonometrics and twitter. PloS one. Public Library of Science; 2011; 6: e26752 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026752 22163266 PMC3233600 · DOI · Paper page
- [36]Mitchell L, Frank MR, Harris KD, Dodds PS, Danforth CM. The geography of happiness: Connecting twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place. PloS one. Public Library of Science; 2013; 8: e64417 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0064417 23734200 PMC3667195 · DOI
- [37]Alajajian SE, Williams JR, Reagan AJ, Alajajian SC, Frank MR, Mitchell L, et al The lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media. PloS one. Public Library of Science; 2017; 12: e0168893 doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0168893 28187216 PMC5302853 · DOI
- [38]Reagan AJ, Danforth CM, Tivnan B, Williams JR, Dodds PS. Sentiment analysis methods for understanding large-scale texts: A case for using continuum-scored words and word shift graphs. EPJ Data Science. Springer; 2017; 6: 28.
- [39]Hausman J. Mismeasured variables in econometric analysis: Problems from the right and problems from the left. Journal of Economic Perspectives. JSTOR; 2001; 57– 67.
- [40]Auffhammer M, Baylis P, Hausman CH. Climate change is projected to have severe impacts on the frequency and intensity of peak electricity demand across the United States. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. National Acad Sciences; 2017; 201613193. PMC5338404 28167756
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy future
Romanello, M., McGushin, A., Di Napoli, C., Drummond, P., Hughes, N., Jamart, L., Kennard, H., Lampard, P., Solano Rodriguez, B., Arnell, N., et al. (2021) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(21)01787-6 · Cited by 1,603 · see citing works
Self-citationRomanello, M., Walawender, M., Hsu, S.-C., Moskeland, A., Palmeiro-Silva, Y., Scamman, D., Ali, Z., Ameli, N., Angelova, D., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., et al. (2024) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(24)01822-1 · Cited by 897 · see citing works
Self-citationEmpirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change
Obradovich, N., Migliorini, R., Paulus, M. P., & Rahwan, I. (2018) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1801528115 · Cited by 492 · see citing works
Self-citationLawrance, E. L., Thompson, R., Newberry Le Vay, J., Page, L., & Jennings, N. (2022) · International Review of Psychiatry · doi:10.1080/09540261.2022.2128725 · Cited by 500 · see citing works
Temperature and mental health: Evidence from the spectrum of mental health outcomes
Mullins, J. T., & White, C. (2019) · Journal of Health Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2019.102240 · Cited by 383 · see citing works
Sleep and the human impacts of climate change
Obradovich, N., & Migliorini, R. (2018) · Sleep Medicine Reviews · doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2018.09.002 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Baylis, P., Obradovich, N., Kryvasheyeu, Y., Chen, H., Coviello, L., Moro, E., Cebrian, M., & Fowler, J. H.
- Affiliations
- University of British Columbia (CA)
- MIT Media Lab (US)
- Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU)
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (US)
- University of California San Diego (US)
- Corresponding author
- Obradovich, Nick
- ORCID
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2018-04-25
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- e0195750
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5918636
- OpenAlex
- W2750725423
- Cited by
- 179
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 7
- FWCI
- 10.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- e-Archivo (Carlos III University of Madrid) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (ES) (FIS2013-47532-C3-3-P, FIS2016-78904-C3-3-P)
- National Science Foundation (DGE0707423, TG-SES130013, 0903551)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis › Climate Change and Health Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction
- Keywords
- weather and mood, sentiment, social media posts, temperature, precipitation, humidity, cloud cover, diurnal temperature range, Facebook, Twitter
- MeSH terms
- Emotions, Humans, Weather, Sample Size, Social Media
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review