Research in Southeast Asia quantifies how much wildfire smoke hurts peoples’ moods; finds the effect is greater when fires originate in other countries.

Peter Dizikes | MIT News
Publication Date: February 13, 2024

Wildfires in Southeast Asia significantly affect peoples’ moods, especially if the fires originate outside a person’s own country, according to a new study.

The study, which measures sentiment by analyzing large amounts of social media data, helps show the psychological toll of wildfires that result in substantial air pollution, at a time when such fires are becoming a high-profile marker of climate change.  

“It has a substantial negative impact on people’s subjective well-being,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “This is a big effect.”

The magnitude of the effect is about the same as another shift uncovered through large-scale studies of sentiment expressed online: When the weekend ends and the work week starts, people’s online postings reflect a sharp drop in mood. The new study finds that daily exposure to typical wildfire smoke levels in the region produces an equivalently large change in sentiment.

“People feel anxious or sad when they have to go to work on Monday, and what we find with the fires is that this is, in fact, comparable to a Sunday-to-Monday sentiment drop,” says co-author Rui Du, a former MIT postdoct who is now an economist at Oklahoma State University.

Read more at https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-measures-psychological-toll-wildfires-0213