Mood and Weather: Feeling the Heat?

The notion that weather plays a significant role in determining a person’s mood is empirically beyond doubt, but quantifying the relationship on a large scale has traditionally been hampered by difficulties in measuring people’s sentiments. In this paper we present the relationship between weather and the U.S. residents’ sentiments from Twitter data and nationwide meteorological records. We measure how temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure correlate with people’s moods, demonstrating the potential of large-scale online data in humanities fields such as psychology. We also provide these results with infographics, which can help the public understand scientific results easily.