Peoples' interests in the weather and their individual differences in being oriented to the weather and its changes fall within the realm of human biometeorology and psychology. What is it about people and the weather that some individuals are highly oriented and cognizant of the atmosphere while other people seem oblivious to it? This question echoes the sentiment attributed to Benjamin Franklin that some people are weatherwise but most are otherwise.
Stewart (2009) examined the individual variations in the orientation and psychological significance that the weather has for people using a self-report measure created for this purpose, the Weather Salience Questionnaire (WxSQ). Weather salience is conceptualized here as a multifaceted and primarily individually based construct that encompasses the general psychological significance of the weather. People will attend to the weather to the extent that its nature or magnitude makes it perceptually salient given their sensory and perceptual characteristics (Stokols, 1979). The weather may be psychologically significant for the emotional and motivational salience that can arise insofar as weather can be broadly experienced as good or bad. Stewart created the WxSQ using a sample of university undergraduate students to evaluate the item characteristics pertaining to the different ways the weather may be of psychological significance to people. These components were consistent with the environmental psychology theories that informed the WxSQ's development: 1. Attention to weather and weather information (e.g., If a friend or family member asked me what the weather forecast was for today I could not tell him or her what to expect.''); 2. sensing, observing, and experiencing the weather directly (e.g., I can tell when there seems to be a lot of moisture in the air''); 3. effects of weather on daily plans, work, and activities [e.g., During certain seasons of the year, the weather conditions routinely (i.e., at least once per week) affect my ability to perform tasks at school or work.'']; 4. effects of weather on moods (e.g.,The weather affects my mood from day to day''); 5. attachment to weather of certain places (e.g., I am attached to the climate of the place where I live or used to live''); 6. need for weather variability and interest in weather changes (e.g., I like to experience variety in the weather from day to day.''); and 7. attention to weather when it may create interruptions, cancellations, or holidays, for example, I become interested in the weather when there is a possibility that I may have a weather-related holiday (e. g., snow day from school or work).'' Detailed information regarding the development of the WxSQ and other psychometric information appears in Stewart (2009) and in Stewart, Lazo, Morss & Demuth (2012).
In the present investigation, Stewart examined the contributions of two cognitive and perceptual variables that may underlie the extent to which the weather and its changes are noticed, attended to, and processed (i. e., perceptually salient). One of these variables measured the cognitive style construct of field dependence/independence. This variable represents more of an established processing style (bordering on an ability) to perceive one's environment along a continuum created by two endpoints: 1. A holistic, top-down, organic, encompassing way of processing the visual field versus 2. A bottom-up, piecemeal, detail-oriented approach (Witkin & Goodenough, 1981). The author used the Portable Rod-and-Frame test with a sample of 84 undergraduate students (71% women) to assess cognitive style. The second variable that the author examined in relation to weather salience was perceptual curiosity (Collins, Litman, & Spielberger, 2004). The perceptual curiosity scale assessed trait-level needs and motives for sensorially receiving information about one's environment. The participants were run individually in session that lasted for 75 minutes.
The results from this project suggested that both of the underlying psychological variables (cognitive style and perceptual curiosity) contributed rather independently to the participants' scores on weather salience. Table 1 shows the magnitudes correlations of selected WxSQ subscale and total scores with performance on the Rod-and-Frame Test and the Perceptual Curiosity Scale.
The results presented in Table 1 suggested that a progressively more detail-oriented, piecemeal visual cognitive style was associated with increasing scores on the WxSQ and its subscales. That is, a cognitive style that allows a person to disembed visual features from the environmental ground is associated with increasing psychological significance (informationally, perceptually, and emotionally) of the weather. Conversely, people with a global and holistic perceptual style tended find weather and its changes less psychologically significant.
With respect to perceptual curiosity, greater expressed curiosity about the sensory stimuli that exist in the environment was correlated positively with seeking information about the weather, sensing and observing the weather, noticing and needing variety in the day-to-day ambient weather, and noticing effects of weather upon one's mood.
The results from this project are noteworthy because they indicate the deeper psychological origins of the attention and significance that people accord the weather. Beyond a passing interest in the content of the weather that one experiences personally or via the media, this project has identified and documented the contributions of two human organismic variables that are associated with meaningful attention to the weather. The author will discuss these findings in terms of their adaptive significance for our human ancestors as well as for efforts to adjust to more extreme weather events that will arise from global climate change.
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