Edwin Grant Dexter (1868-1938) was one of the first researchers to study empirically the effects of specific weather conditions on human behavior. Dexter (1904) published his findings in a book, Weather Influences. The author's purposes in this presentation are to: 1. describe briefly Dexter's professional life and to examine the contexts and motivations that led Dexter to conduct some of the first empirical behavioral biometeorological studies of the time; 2. describe the methods Dexter used to examine weather-behavior relationships and briefly to characterize the results that he reported in Weather Influences; and 3. provide an historical analysis of Dexter's work and assess its significance for human behavioral biometeorology. Dexter's investigations are significant for historical reasons because he was the first person following the formal emergence of psychology as an academic discipline in the late 1800's to investigate weather, psychology and social relationships. Further, Dexter utilized comparatively large samples of adults and children along with data from the U. S. Weather Bureau offices in Denver, Colorado and New York City to describe these relationships and to formulate a psychophysiological theory of weather influences. Dexter's scholarship is significant at the current time given the growing interest of the atmospheric science community in societal impacts.
Dexter's Weather Influences
Background. The first 54 pages of Weather Influences were devoted to a description of weather folklore and literature. This examination appears to have served two purposes, the first which was to legitimize posing the questions of: to what extent does weather influence psychological and social processes and how might these influences operate? Second, such a review made it clear to Dexter that no empirically-based studies of weather influences had been undertaken. Given the recent emergence of large-n paradigms in psychology and sociology, conducting empirical studies of weather influences using the new methodology seemed to be a logical next-step for Dexter.
Populations and Variables Studied. Dexter studied a range of social and behavioral variables that could be influenced by the weather. To examine the relationship of the social or psychological variable, Dexter tabled the occurrence of each variable (e. g., assaults) according to the meteorological parameter under consideration and determined the relative frequency of the occurrence within each interval of the variable. For each meteorological variable, Dexter differenced the expectancy and occurrence curves to ascertain whether the social or psychological variable under analysis was more or less likely to occur under the given conditions.
Legacy of Dexter's Weather Influences
A search of multiple databases along with a search of Google Books, revealed that Dexter's Weather Influences has been cited in approximately 250 books and professional journal articles. This figure represents a lower limit because not all sources that may have cited a book published in 1904 have been incorporated into the searchable scholarly databases. Regarding the citation trends of Weather Influences over time, a peak of citations appears between 1910 and approximately 1935. Although such a peak in citations is expected for many scholarly works, followed by a gradual and steady decrease over, it is noteworthy that approximately 18% of the identified citations occurred from 1980 to 2010. This result suggests that Dexter's work continues to be of interest, value, and use to researchers and writers. In this regard Weather Influences seems to have become somewhat of a classic reference in being the first systematic contribution to examine the effects of weather on individual and social behavior.
Dexter's work appears to have influenced at least two significant lines of scholarship that focused upon weather-behavior relationships. First, the human geographer Ellsworth Huntington significantly incorporated some of Dexter's results and his theory of vital nerve energies (Weather Influences, Chapter XV) in describing the effects of weather upon the behavioral traits of people in Asia. A second and lasting legacy of Weather Influences appears in the criminology literature. Specifically, Dexter's empirical observations of greater behavioral problems in school and higher arrest rates for conflict and assault during times of warmer weather has remained of interest to researchers in criminology since the book's publication. Since 1990 eight journal articles have been published that investigated the relationships of weather with aggressive, violent, or otherwise criminal behavior. Biometeorology is a wonderfully integrative field with a rich history (Bouma 1987; Höppe 1997; Weihe 1997). The pure and applied research questions that gave rise to biometeorology stretch far into the past, beyond the formal establishment of the International Society of Biometeorology. Although I have examined the contributions of one researcher who primarily was interested in the behavioral aspects of human biometeorology, there are many other scientists whose work has been relevant in shaping the history, nature, and scope of the field.
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