Unpleasant weather brings out unpleasant emotions on social media, study shows
by Justine Calma from The Verge - All Posts on (#66XG6)
An abandoned and melting pint of ice cream along a city street on June 27th, 2021, in Portland, Oregon. | Photo by Nathan Howard / Getty Images
Heat spells and downpours are serious mood killers, a huge analysis of Twitter conversations confirms. The international study is part of efforts to understand how climate change affects mental health around the world.
Scrutinizing tweets from 190 countries, nearly every one on Earth, researchers looked at how positive" and negative" expressions shifted during extreme heat and rainfall events. Unsurprisingly, they found that during bad weather, negative sentiments became noisier and positive expressions became few and far between in each region. While it might seem obvious that bad weather can put people in bad moods, researchers see the consistency of the findings as a warning that people might be struggling to adapt to climate...