Do you find yourself getting the blues in the winter? If you do, you aren’t alone. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of Americans experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a form of depression that comes on in the winter and is thought to be related to decreased exposure to sunlight. Symptoms of SAD include negative mood, changes in appetite and sleep patterns, and decreased energy. Many more people experience less extreme versions of these symptoms during the winter months (Wehr & Rosenthal, 1989).

But it’s not just our moods that shift with the changing of the seasons. In a new review (Hohm, Wormley, Schaller, & Varnum), my colleagues and I found that seasons affect a wide range of mental and behavioral phenomena. Here I highlight some of these findings and discuss some potential reasons we identified for why seasons may affect us in the ways that they do.

Aggression, Sex, and Helping Others

It’s a widely held folk belief that people become more irritable and more aggressive when it’s hot outside. It turns out there’s more than a grain of truth to this idea. Aggressive behavior, from horn honking (Kenrick & MacFarlane, 1996) to violent crime (Lauritsen & White, 2014) tends to peak in the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere.

Our sexual behavior also appears to vary with seasons, with data from a variety of sources suggesting a bi-annual cycle. Data on internet searches for prostitution, condom sales, and abortions all point to sexual activity peaking in the summer and around Christmas (see Hohm et al.). Interestingly, a new study involving nearly a half-million American and Swedish users of the Natural Cycles birth control app found that women were more likely to ovulate and engage in sexual behavior as the length of the day increased, which may help explain the summer peak in sex suggested by prior findings (Shanmugam et al., 2023). As the authors of that study note, many other species, like goats and horses, follow a similar pattern as well.

The seasons also appear to influence how kind we are to others. For example, charitable contributions in countries with Christian traditions increase dramatically around Christmas (Ekström, 2018). People in these societies are also more likely to tip their waiters generously during the holiday season (Greenberg, 2014).

Combing through the literature, we found a range of other ways that seasons shape our psychology. Our cognitive performance, our preference for different colors and different types of music, and the kind of foods we tend to eat all vary over the course of the year (Hohm et al.). For example, one study conducted in Belgium found that people had the hardest time keeping their focus in the summer and the easiest time doing so in the winter (Meyer et al., 2016).

Why Seasons Affect Us

There are a number of reasons why seasons may affect us the way that they do (Hohm et al.). Some of these reasons have to do with changes in exposure to sunlight as is likely the case with SAD or seasonal variation in sexual activity. In other cases, such as seasonal variation in generosity, the cultural associations we hold with different times of year, such as the traditions and norms surrounding Christmas, may be driving the effect.

Seasons may also cause shifts in other key aspects of our environments in ways that in turn could lead to psychological and behavioral changes. For example, our odds of getting sick tend to fluctuate throughout the year. Previous work suggests that when the threat of infectious disease is greater, people may be more likely to conform (Murray, Trudeau, & Schaller, 2011) or endorse more traditional social views (Tybur et al., 2016). We might then expect that these tendencies, too, would change over the course of the year.

In a similar vein, in places that experience large seasonal influxes of tourists, such as the Bahamas or Phoenix in the wintertime, the effective population density changes over the course of the year. Here again, previous work suggests that this kind of environmental change might have important consequences. Higher population density tends to lead to more long-term planning and to people having fewer children but investing more in their upbringing (Sng et al., 2017). So, in these types of places, we might expect these tendencies to shift over the course of the year as well.

Taking Seasons Seriously

If we realize that seasons may affect everything from our moods to our mating behavior, this can help us better understand how we and those around us are likely to feel and act at different times of the year. This realization also highlights a potential problem in how most psychological research is conducted: Typically, unless a psychologist sets out to test a hypothesis about seasonal effects, they don’t tend to report the time of year when they collect their data. Nor when they collect data over many months do they tend to test for the presence of seasonal influences. As we suggest in our new paper, the season may be right to change that.

References

Ekström, M. (2018). Seasonal altruism: How Christmas shapes unsolicited charitable giving. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 153, 177–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.07.004

Greenberg, A. E. (2014). On the complementarity of prosocial norms: The case of restaurant tipping during the holidays. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 97, 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2013.10.014

Hohm, I., Wormley, A. S., Schaller, M., & Varnum, M. E. W. Homo temporus: Seasonal cycles as a fundamental source of variation in human psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science. Published online July 10, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691623117869

Kenrick, D. T., & MacFarlane, S. W. (1986). Ambient temperature and horn honking: A field study of the heat/aggression relationship. Environment and Behavior, 18(2), 179–191. https://doi.org/10.1177/001391658618200

Lauritsen, J. L., & White. (2014). Seasonal Patterns in Criminal Victimization Trends. US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/spcvt.pdf

Meyer, C., Muto, V., Jaspar, M., Kussé, C., Lambot, E., Chellappa, S. L., Degueldre, C., Balteau, E., Luxen, A., Middleton, B., Archer, S. N., Collette, F., Dijk, D.-J., Phillips, C., Maquet, P., & Vandewalle, G. (2016). Seasonality in human cognitive brain responses. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 113(11), 3066–3071. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518129113

Murray, D. R., Trudeau, R., & Schaller, M. (2011). On the origins of cultural differences in conformity: Four tests of the pathogen prevalence hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 318–329.

Shanmugam, D., Espinosa, M., Gassen, J., van Lamsweerde, A., Pearson, J. T., Benhar, E., & Hill, S. (2023). A multi-site study of the relationship between photoperiod and ovulation rate using Natural Cycles data. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 8379.

Sng, O., Neuberg, S. L., Varnum, M. E. W., & Kenrick, D. T. (2017). The crowded life is a slow life: Population density and life history strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(5), 736–754.

Tybur, J. M., Inbar, Y., Aarøe, L., Barclay, P., Barlow, F. K., De Barra, M., … & Žeželj, I. (2016). Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(44), 12408–12413.

Wehr, T. A., & Rosenthal, N. E. (1989). Seasonality and affective illness. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 146(7), 829–839. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.146.7.829

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• Barbie shows how men often translate and funnel existential angst into anger, resentment, and sexual longing.
• The movie gives a nuanced model of male self-care and self-acceptance.

Watching the “Barbie” movie over the weekend, I was surprised by the relatively nuanced portrayal of masculinity, one which resonated with real issues and concerns that I have seen often in my clinical practice. Two aspects stand out in Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of the archetypal Ken.

1. “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”

Near the beginning of the movie, the narrator of the film offers this key distinction between Ken and Barbie, and we see Ken’s face light up when Barbie looks at him, acknowledges him, and shows interest in him. When she doesn’t look his way, however, or when she appears to choose friends over him, Ken slumps dejectedly in what looks like deep shame and self-loathing.

This dynamic and experience is very familiar in a clinical context, particularly in couples therapy. The first concerns the over-valuation of a woman’s gaze and attention on male sense of self-esteem, and even an existential sense of identity. Barbie’s gaze and attention is everything to Ken, and when she does not look or give him attention, it is as if he were alone in the universe.

This feeling is not too dissimilar to the experience that I see in my practice, where men often experience a greater degree of rejection and isolation in a relationship as a result of perceived lack of attention or affection from their partner or spouse. One area where this plays out very strongly is in the realm of touch and sexuality. Men, in my experience, funnel a lot more “existential value” into their partner’s physical affection, touch, and sexual connection.

When men are having frequent sex, for example, there is often an elated sense of self, masculine assurance, and an overall sense of things being “right in the world.” When this active romantic attention drops, however, this can often feel like an existential collapse — where one’s sense of attractiveness, worth, and general self-value can disappear to almost nothing. So much so, that this degraded sense of self can translate into minor resentful behaviours, like grumpy irritation, infantile pleads for sex, or in worse cases, affairs.

The film thematizes this dynamic nicely by showing Ken’s drift into a desire for masculine dominance and “patriarchal” expression; if he can’t have Barbie’s attention and esteeming gaze, he can at least exert his wish for assurance via dominance and other claims of power and authority over other men, women or objects (his mojo dojo man cave).

Clinically-speaking, what we see here is the rapid move from shame to anger: Ken experiences deep shame which gets re-routed into resentment and angry expressions of masculinity. If this were couples’ therapy, we would want to give voice to the shame, and instead of indulging the shame through anger, work to find ways to articulate this desire and translate it into perhaps a wooing or seduction that works for his partner and himself. Or, we’d want to find ways to manage and cope with the difficulty of feeling alienated from her gaze. In other words, we’d want to prolong Ken’s capacity to stay with the feelings of shame instead of converting them into a resentment man cave.

2. Sexualizing existential dread and loneliness.

The second case of male psychology that the film enacts well concerns the relationship to shame or existential solitude and the conversion to sex-as-soothing. In the latter parts of the film (spoiler alert!), Barbie decides to take a break from “Barbie and Ken” and he is left feeling alone and adrift. When she approaches him for comfort and conversation, Ken quickly interprets it as an advance and tries to kiss and embrace her (which she rejects).

What I liked about the sequences is how it shows this translation of existential solitude and anxiety into the “quick -fix” of love and sex. In the same way that shame can quickly morph into resentment and anger, here we see loneliness and existential angst being converted into a sexual plea — for sex to solve and resolve these bad feelings.

The cheap solution to this male dread (therapeutically-speaking) might be for Barbie to simply give in to his need for an embrace and soothe his feelings of rejection and shame through a kind of pity-kiss. From a couples’ therapy approach, however, this would not amount to true and authentic seduction or mutual desire and would, in fact, regress the couple to a kind of maternal relationship where sex is doled out as pity, an act that only tends to reinforce the shame and low self-esteem in the long run (because she ultimately does not desire him authentically).

The clinical “solution” to this need for love and sex is handily dealt with in the film, as Barbie does not negate or absolutely abandon Ken but rather supports him through his tough feelings so he can manage and handle them on his own (she does not presume to resolve the feelings for him).

As a therapeutic technique, I think it is the right strategy, as it does not offer an easy way out of difficult emotions (it does not falsely placate and soothe) but instead turns the emotions inward and gives Ken (that stand-in for a universal male) the opportunity to explore, mediate, and narrate his self apart from Barbie. In this way, Ken offers a rare opportunity for us to witness a model of male self-care in popular culture, where an archetypal male is able to slowly and independently work towards self-acceptance and self-love, or being “Kenough.”

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