Weather impacts expressed sentiment

PLoS One. 2018 Apr 25;13(4):e0195750. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195750. eCollection 2018.

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.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Emotions*
  • Humans
  • Sample Size
  • Social Media
  • Weather*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: FIS2013-47532-C3-3-P, FIS2016-78904-C3-3-P (http://www.mineco.gob.es/); and National Science Foundation DGE0707423, TG-SES130013, 0903551 (https://www.nsf.gov/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.