Department of Psychology, Washington State University, P.O. Box 664820, Pullman, WA, 99164-4820, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
BMC Psychol. 2024 Sep 27;12(1):504. doi: 10.1186/s40359-024-02005-z.
The effects of heat exposure on negative affect are thought to be central to the observed relationships between hot summer days and deleterious outcomes, such as violent crime or mental health crises. As these relationships are likely to be magnified by the effects of climate change, a better understanding of how consistent or variable the effects of hot weather on affective states is required. The current work combines data gathered from an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study on individuals' thermal perceptions, comfort, and affective states in outdoor environments during their daily lives with high spatiotemporal resolution climate-modeled weather variables. Using these data, associations between objective weather variables (temperature, humidity, etc.), perceived heat (thermal perception and comfort), and affective states are examined. Overall, objective weather data reasonably predicted perception and comfort, but only comfort predicted negative affective states. The variance explained across individuals was generally very low in predicting negative affect or comfort, but within-person variance explained was high. In other words, while there may be a relatively consistent relationship between temperature and psychological experience for any given person, there are significant individual differences across people. Age and gender were examined as moderators of these relationships, and while gender had no impact, participant age showed several significant interactions. Specifically, while older adults tended to experience more thermal discomfort and perceived higher temperatures as hotter, the relationship between discomfort and negative affect was lower in older adults. Taken together, these results emphasize the importance of thermal discomfort specifically in predicting negative affect, as well as the high inter-individual variability in thermal perceptions and comfort for the same ambient temperatures.
热暴露对负面情绪的影响被认为是炎热天气与暴力犯罪或心理健康危机等不良后果之间观察到的关系的核心。由于气候变化的影响可能会放大这些关系，因此需要更好地了解炎热天气对情感状态的影响是一致的还是多变的。当前的工作将个体在日常生活中户外环境中的热感觉、舒适度和情感状态的生态瞬时评估（EMA）研究中收集的数据与高时空分辨率气候模型化的天气变量相结合。使用这些数据，研究了客观天气变量（温度、湿度等）、感知热（热感觉和舒适度）与情感状态之间的关联。总体而言，客观天气数据可以合理地预测感知和舒适度，但只有舒适度可以预测负面情感状态。在预测负面情绪或舒适度方面，个体之间的方差解释通常非常低，但个体内的方差解释很高。换句话说，虽然对于给定的人来说，温度和心理体验之间可能存在相对一致的关系，但人与人之间存在很大的差异。研究了年龄和性别对这些关系的调节作用，虽然性别没有影响，但参与者的年龄显示出了几个显著的相互作用。具体来说，虽然老年人往往会感到更多的热不适，并且会将更高的温度感知为更热，但不适感与负面情绪之间的关系在老年人中较低。总之，这些结果强调了热不适在预测负面情绪方面的重要性，以及在相同环境温度下个体对热的感知和舒适度的高度个体差异。
