Let's be serious, winter makes us lazy. Maybe its just human nature or there really is some kind of correlation between weather and human behaviour, but winter - the season, the weather - makes us lazy.

So my question is, is there a correlation between human behaviour and the weather?

Why does sunny and warm weather get pinned with the idea of warm and welcoming whilst rain and wind are pinned with the adjectives dreary or gloomy. Pathetic fallacy, we all know what it's called but has anyone every thought that maybe, maybe these weathers can actually make you feel emotions and you were not fully aware of. Does rain really make us sad? Does the warm weather make us feel happy? Is there really any effect on us?

While Spring and Summer sound and feel cheery and may be the seasons of hope and happiness for many, it is the season of hopelessness for those who are depressed. Koskein et al. found that outdoor workers were far more likely to commit suicide in the Spring months than during winter time. For indoor workers, studies showed that suicides peaked in the Summertime.

In 2012, Christodoulou et al performed a comprehensive meta-analysis on the seasonality of suicide and discovered a universal truth, "studies from both the Northern and Southern hemisphere report a seasonal pattern for suicides. Thus, it seemed that seasonality is observed with an increase in suicides for Spring and early Summer and an analogous decrease during Autumn and Winter months, this is a constant, if not a universal behaviour that affects both the Northern and Southern hemisphere."

Klimstra et al. found that half of the 415 adolescents studied weren't really impacted at all by changes in the weather, while the other half were. Further analysis determined the following weather personality types: Summer lovers were happier, less fearful and less angrier on days with more sunshine and higher temperatures. When it rained, these people would be associated with more anxiety and anger.

Summer hater were less happy and more fearful and angry when the temperature is higher and when there were more hours of precipitation, they would tend to be happier and less fearful and angry.

Rain haters are generally angrier and less happy on days with more rain and bad weather. By comparison, they were more happy and less angry, but more fearful, on days with more sunshine and high temperatures.

Hsiang, who is now an assistant professor at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, worked with co-first author Marshall Burke, a doctoral candidate in Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Edward Miguel, the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at Berkeley.

"We attained a huge amount of the data that was available and we used the same method on all of the data so that we could directly compare studies," Hsiang said. "Once we did that, we saw that all of the results were actually highly consistent - previously they just weren't being analysed in a consistent way."

The researchers examined three categories of conflict: "personal violence and crime," which includes murder, assault, rape and domestic violence; "inter group violence and political instability," such as civil wars, riots, ethnic violence and land invasions; and "institutional breakdowns," which are abrupt and major changes in governing institutions or, in extreme cases, the collapse of entire civilizations.

Extreme climatic conditions amplified violence in all three categories, regardless of geography, societal wealth or the time in history. An aberrant climate coexisted with incidents including spikes in domestic violence in India and Australia; increased assaults and murders in the United States and Tanzania; ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia; land invasions in Brazil; police using force in the Netherlands; civil conflicts throughout the tropics; the collapse of ancient empires; and wars and displacement in Middle-Ages Europe.

"We find the same pattern over and over again, regardless of whether we look at data from Brazil, Somalia, China or the United States," Miguel said. "We often think of modern society as largely independent of the environment, due to technological advances, but our findings challenge that notion. The climate appears to be a critical factor sustaining peace and well being across human societies." This officially and finally showing that there is a correlation between human behaviour and the climatic conditions.

Saima Ali - The Sydney Russell School