Dresser says the evidence suggests that heat can influence us in sometimes indiscernible ways. “All of these [studies] seem to point to a reduced ability to think clearly and quickly and efficiently when the body is too hot,” he says.
There’s also research to suggest that heat can make you moodier or irritated, in part, perhaps, by raising cortisol levels, and inducing a stress response.
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NPR has a text version of their site, see article at https://text.npr.org/1190627995
Oh yeah, I forgot this existed… I just setup the Firefox Redirector extension to send NPR links to the text only version of the site now. Thanks for reminding me.
I am living proof of that second point, but my body always has a natural warmth, so in any kind of heat I feel like I’m melting.
The 1st study https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002605 mentions that “Students chose their summer housing preferences on a first-come, first-serve basis in a manner that was not expected to be associated with exposure or outcome.”, but couldn’t this be effected by wealth, and effect the results?
Because they’re effecfively measuring the change in the students’ performance in the STROOP and ADD tests before and after a heat wave, baseline factors such as wealth and income should be controlled for.
They note in the results that in the initial tests there was no significant difference between both groups’ results.
