{"id":109099,"date":"2025-08-27T02:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T00:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/?p=109099"},"modified":"2025-08-27T09:19:41","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T07:19:41","slug":"study-links-rising-temperatures-and-declining-moods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sonnenseite.com\/en\/environment\/study-links-rising-temperatures-and-declining-moods\/","title":{"rendered":"Study links rising temperatures and declining moods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An analysis of social media in 157 countries finds hotter weather is associated with more negative sentiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rising global temperatures affect human activity in many ways. Now, a new study illuminates an important dimension of the problem: Very hot days are associated with more negative moods, as shown by a large-scale look at social media postings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, the study examines 1.2 billion social media posts from 157 countries over the span of a year. The research finds that when the temperature rises above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 35 degrees Celsius, expressed sentiments become about 25 percent more negative in lower-income countries and about 8 percent more negative in better-off countries. Extreme heat affects people emotionally, not just physically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur study reveals that rising temperatures don\u2019t just threaten physical health or economic productivity \u2014 they also affect how people feel, every day, all over the world,\u201d says Siqi Zheng, a professor in MIT\u2019s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Center for Real Estate (CRE), and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. \u201cThis work opens up a new frontier in understanding how climate stress is shaping human well-being at a planetary scale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper, \u201cUnequal Impacts of Rising Temperatures on Global Human Sentiment<\/a>,\u201d is published today in the journal One Earth<\/em>. The authors are Jianghao Wang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud SM \u201922, a graduate of MIT\u2019s Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; Juan Palacios, a visiting assistant professor at MIT\u2019s Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL) and an assistant professor Maastricht University; Yichun Fan, of SUL and Duke University; Devika Kakkar, of Harvard University; Nick Obradovich, of SUL and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa; and Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at CRE and DUSP. Zheng is also the faculty director of CRE and founded the Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social media as a window<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To conduct the study, the researchers evaluated 1.2 billion posts from the social media platforms Twitter and Weibo, all of which appeared in 2019. They used a natural language processing technique called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to analyze 65 languages across the 157 countries in the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each social media post was given a sentiment rating from 0.0 (for very negative posts) to 1.0 (for very positive posts). The posts were then aggregated geographically to 2,988 locations and evaluated in correlation with area weather. From this method, the researchers could then deduce the connection between extreme temperatures and expressed sentiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSocial media data provides us with an unprecedented window into human emotions across cultures and continents,\u201d Wang says. \u201cThis approach allows us to measure emotional impacts of climate change at a scale that traditional surveys simply cannot achieve, giving us real-time insights into how temperature affects human sentiment worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To assess the effects of temperatures on sentiment in higher-income and middle-to-lower-income settings, the scholars also used a World Bank cutoff level of gross national income per-capita annual income of $13,845, finding that in places with incomes below that, the effects of heat on mood were triple those found in economically more robust settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThanks to the global coverage of our data, we find that people in low- and middle-income countries experience sentiment declines from extreme heat that are three times greater than those in high-income countries,\u201d Fan says. \u201cThis underscores the importance of incorporating adaptation into future climate impact projections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the long run<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using long-term global climate models, and expecting some adaptation to heat, the researchers also produced a long-range estimate of the effects of extreme temperatures on sentiment by the year 2100. Extending the current findings to that time frame, they project a 2.3 percent worsening of people\u2019s emotional well-being based on high temperatures alone by then \u2014 although that is a far-range projection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s clear now, with our present study adding to findings from prior studies, that weather alters sentiment on a global scale,\u201d Obradovich says. \u201cAnd as weather and climates change, helping individuals become more resilient to shocks to their emotional states will be an important component of overall societal adaptation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers note that there are many nuances to the subject, and room for continued research in this area. For one thing, social media users are not likely to be a perfectly representative portion of the population, with young children and the elderly almost certainly using social media less than other people. However, as the researchers observe in the paper, the very young and elderly are probably particularly vulnerable to heat shocks, making the response to hot weather possible even larger than their study can capture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research is part of the Global Sentiment project<\/a> led by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and the study\u2019s dataset is publicly available. Zheng and other co-authors have previously investigated these dynamics using social media, although never before at this scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe hope this resource helps researchers, policymakers, and communities better prepare for a warming world,\u201d Zheng says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research was supported, in part, by Zheng\u2019s chaired professorship research fund, and grants Wang received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. <\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n

Source<\/h5>\r\n\n\n\n

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 2025<\/a><\/p>\n

Diese Meldung teilen<\/div>