Daylight saving policies affect online emotions

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2767365_(Table of contents)

The amount of sunlight people are exposed to and the social clock is directly related to Daylight Saving Time (DST) policies. Increasing work efficiency and reducing energy consumption were the original motivations for the policy, but nowadays the effects on human well-being and health are controversial topics. We conducted a social media sentiment analysis to observe the psychological impact of DST on people using a random sample of Turkish tweets between 2011 and 2021. Turkey’s exit from the policy in 2016 provides us with an opportunity to compare the periods when DST was applied and when it was not. From this comparison, we find that setting the clocks forward by one hour in the spring (spring-forward) leads to a significant increase in the average sentiment scores of tweets posted over the following 15 evenings. We also found that in DST years, average sentiment scores are significantly higher on spring mornings than on fall mornings. The results of the diurnal and seasonal analyses show that the time shifts due to daylight saving time lead to significant differences in people’s moods, especially in the morning and evening hours of the day. Our methodology also helps us point to important societal events in this 10-year observed period. We hope that our findings will lead to the design of better policies for Turkey and improve collective well-being.