Bad Times

As previously discussed in an earlier blog feeling good is normally what we want from life. Nobody wants to be in a bad mood and experience negative affect. It just isn’t a lot of fun. However, many misconceptions over what can cause us to feel happy or sad exist and although old wives tales sound good, they aren’t always accurate. Feeling down? What can turn that frown upside down? A nice sunny day with the birds singing? Thinking positively and telling yourself ‘You can achieve anything’?

Disappointingly research suggests that these two common notions are probably not going to make us feel that much better. Furthermore, dependent on the person one of them is likely to make you feel a whole lot worse. Generally we aren’t all that good at working out what does and doesn’t influence our mood. A case in point is the weather. A popular held belief is that when the sun is out and the birds are singing we tend to feel a lot happier, active and enthusiastic. A large scale by Denissen et al. 2008 examined how weather conditions may influence mood. The study involved over 1000 participants in Germany. Participants were recruited through various internet advertisements and completed the study over the internet. Each night (for 30 nights) participants would log onto a specially designed website and answer various questions. The questionnaires assessed a number of constructs. Positive affect (the amount of positive emotion one feels), negative affect (the amount of negative emotion one feels) and tiredness (you guessed it: how tired one feels).

Researchers then accessed weather data from the German weather institute matching participants post codes to the relevant weather reports from the area. Did the temperature, wind power or amount of sunlight have an effect on positive affect? Did the world literally and mentally glow more? Results from this study suggest not. Warmer and sunnier days did not tend to make individuals experience more positive affect. The good weather didn’t make individuals feel more active, inspired or determined. Additionally, previous studies have come to similar conclusions.

So if weather can’t make us feel better can it make us feel more afraid, anxious and distressed? Did weather have an impact on how bad our German friends were feeling? Yes it did. Lower temperatures, less sunlight and high wind speeds were associated with greater negative emotions and feelings. Finally, the data also suggested that fewer hours of sunlight resulted in greater feelings of tiredness. But it must be mentioned that these effects were only small but nevertheless significant. It would therefore appear that rather than looking forward to summer we should probably be worrying more about winter. More interestingly, could these small changes in mood shape what we do with our day? Could a cloudy gray morning influence you in choosing not to take a chance with a job application or controversial art exhibit?

Self help books are a vast and lucrative business. They tend to tell us not only do we have to feel good about ourselves, but we also have to tell ourselves this and believe it. Should you? I would be extremely sceptical about this. In an ingenuous article entitled ‘Self help statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others’, Wood et al. 2009 examined what the effects of such self help statements may be. The experiments tended to be quite simple; researchers assigned participants to either a self help statement condition or no-self help statement condition. Participants were required to continuously write down any thoughts or feelings that occurred during a 4 minute period. In addition to this, the self help statement group were required to repeat to themselves ‘I am a loveable person’ every time they heard a doorbell. The bell was rung every 15 seconds automatically. After this all participants completed a number of measures covertly assessing mood and their current positive/negative feelings about themselves. Prior to the experiment all participants had completed measures of self esteem (self esteem is essentially how positively you view yourself).

Across the studies the researchers found a strong trend of repeating the over the top typical self help phrase ‘I am a loveable person’ to make individuals with low self esteem actually feel worse about themselves. In comparison, for individuals with high self esteem the self help phrase repetition had a very small positive effect. The irony behind this of course is that it’s fairly likely that self help books attract those that aren’t all that happy with themselves. Thinking a little deeper it isn’t just self help books that might trigger the use of such statements. Friends and magazines advising to ‘think positively’ may cause this inadvertent back firing too.

Why did the researchers discover this unexpected finding? One explanation may be that self help statements direct some attention or thought toward exactly the opposite: why you aren’t such a loveable person. Yet, it is a tricky one to answer and the researchers couldn’t find any obvious explanation from their data

Implications

When colleagues declare they are feeling great because of the sunny weather outside bring them crashing back down to reality.
Blindly thinking positively isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps such instructions are sometimes just too unrealistic and hopelessly optimistic and thus remind us why we are forcing ourselves to say them.

If you are extremely fond of yourself then go crazy with self help statements. Based on Wood et al. you might feel even better.

Try not to let the weather get you down.