Weather impacts expressed sentiment

2017/09/30 by Patrick Baylis, Nick Obradovich, Yury Kryvasheyeu +5 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Media Influence and Health #Misinformation and Its Impacts

paper · pdf · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0195750

openalex publication_date 2018/04/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

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.

Citations

• Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
• NCEP–DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis (R-2)
• Robust Inference With Multiway Clustering
• Temperature and the Allocation of Time: Implications for Climate Change
• What a Nasty day: Exploring Mood-Weather Relationship from Twitter
• Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales.

Cited by

• Real-world unexpected outcomes predict city-level mood states and risk-taking behavior
• Weather to Protest: The Effect of Black Lives Matter Protests on the 2020 Presidential Election

Discussions

• Considering our results w/ prior research by Baylis and Obradovich that showed social media-post expressions independently worsen on hot, cold, or wet days, more extreme weather appears to both amplif [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]