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How Much Does A Full Moon Affect Behaviour?

This report makes me mad.

Myth Debunked: Full Moon Does Not Increase Incidence of Psychological Problems
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 114255.htm

Full moon. Contrary to popular belief, there is no connection between lunar phases and the incidence of psychological problems. (Credit: © Zacarias da Mata / Fotolia)

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2012) — Contrary to popular belief, there is no connection between lunar phases and the incidence of psychological problems. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers directed by Professor Geneviève Belleville of Université Laval's School of Psychology after having examined the relationship between the moon's phases and the number of patients who show up at hospital emergency rooms experiencing psychological problems.

Details on the study can be found on the website of the scientific journal General Hospital Psychiatry.

To determine whether the widespread belief linking the moon to mental health problems was true, researchers evaluated patients who visited emergency rooms at Montreal's Sacré-Coeur Hospital and Hôtel-Dieu de Lévis between March 2005 and April 2008. They focused specifically on 771 individuals who showed up at the emergency room with chest pains for which no medical cause could be determined. Psychological evaluations revealed that a sizeable number of these patients suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and mood disorders, or suicidal thoughts.

Using lunar calendars, the researchers determined the moon phase in which each of these visits occurred. The results of their analyses revealed no link between the incidence of psychological problems and the four lunar phases. There was one exception, however; anxiety disorders were 32% less frequent during the last lunar quarter. "This may be coincidental or due to factors we did not take into account," suggested Geneviève Belleville. "But one thing is certain: we observed no full-moon or new-moon effect on psychological problems."

This study's conclusions run contrary to what many believe, including 80% of nurses and 64% of doctors who are convinced that the lunar cycle affects patients' mental health. "We hope our results will encourage health professionals to put that idea to rest," said Dr. Belleville. "Otherwise, this misperception could, on the one hand, color their judgment during the full moon phase; or, on the other hand, make them less attentive to psychological problems that surface during the remainder of the month."

In addition to Geneviève Belleville, the study was coauthored by Guillaume Foldes-Busque, Mélanie Dixon, Évelyne Marquis-Pelletier, and Sarah Barbeau from Université Laval's School of Psychology; Julien Poitras and Richard Fleet from Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine; Jean-Marc Chauny and Jean Diodati from Université de Montréal; and André Marchand from UQAM.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Université Laval.

Journal Reference:

Geneviève Belleville, Guillaume Foldes-Busque, Mélanie Dixon, Évelyne Marquis-Pelletier, Sarah Barbeau, Julien Poitras, Jean-Marc Chauny, Jean G. Diodati, Richard Fleet, André Marchand. Impact of seasonal and lunar cycles on psychological symptoms in the ED: an empirical investigation of widely spread beliefs. General Hospital Psychiatry, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2012.10.002
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On the other hand:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23405941

A full Moon can disturb a good night's sleep, scientists believe.

Researchers found evidence of a "lunar influence" in a study of 33 volunteers sleeping in tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

When the Moon was round, the volunteers took longer to nod off and had poorer quality sleep, despite being shut in a darkened room, Current Biology reports.

They also had a dip in levels of a hormone called melatonin that is linked to natural-body clock cycles.

When it is dark, the body makes more melatonin. And it produces less when it is light.

Being exposed to bright lights in the evening or too little light during the day can disrupt the body's normal melatonin cycles.

But the work in Current Biology, by Prof Christian Cajochen and colleagues from Basel University in Switzerland, suggests the Moon's effects may be unrelated to its brightness.

Lunar rhythms

The volunteers were unaware of the purpose of the study and could not see the Moon from their beds in the researchers' sleep lab.

They each spent two separate nights at the lab under close observation.

Findings revealed that around the full Moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by nearly a third. Melatonin levels also dipped.

The volunteers also took five minutes longer to fall asleep and slept for 20 minutes less when there was a full Moon.

Prof Cajochen said: "The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not 'see' the Moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase."

Some people may be exquisitely sensitive to the Moon, say the researchers...
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Doesn't sound as if it's a huge influence, mind you.
 
I get terrible insomnia from full moons, earlier this week I had two nights where I didn't sleep til gone 4. I get a strange and terrible pull to go out in the moonlight and run through the fields! As soon as it starts to wane I'm back to normal.
 
marionXXX said:
I get terrible insomnia from full moons, earlier this week I had two nights where I didn't sleep til gone 4. I get a strange and terrible pull to go out in the moonlight and run through the fields! As soon as it starts to wane I'm back to normal.
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I do get insomnia from a full moon too - but I don't run into the fields - there aren't any around where I live. I don't need a scientist to confirm the effect on me - I've known this all my life.
 
I don't actually run through the fields, I just feel like I want to!
 
marionXXX said:
I don't actually run through the fields, I just feel like I want to!
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But it put a nice image into my head! :D
 
I get insomnia. Never thought to look at the state of the moon. But I'm surrounded by fields, so next time I'll take a look out of the window at the moon and all those people running about in the fields...
 
As a kid we would go for moon lit walks on full moon nights. It's something my mother still loves to do. It always felt like there were lods of us walking along, rather than the actual 4 or 5 people. To this day she wont have curtains closed in her bedroom so she can see the moon light.
 
The current house we lived in isn't orientated to the moon at all, it is really hard to see it. I used to love going for moonlit walks but wouldn't dare round here, it's too skanky.
 
marionXXX said:
The current house we lived in isn't orientated to the moon at all, it is really hard to see it.
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The Moon actually covers a greater amount of sky than the sun. If you can see the sun sometimes, then you should be able to see the moon too. (But usually not at the same time.)

Over a year, the sun moves through a band of the sky 2 x 23.5 degrees wide (north to south). But the band covered by the moon (over a longer period, admittedly) is 2 x 28.5 degrees.

The Full Moon rises opposite the direction of Sunset, +/- up to 5 degrees.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Was talking to a copper once who said at the local station they always knew when it was a full moon because more people acted stupidly.
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Yes. The effects of the Full Moon have long been noted at mental care facilities, hence "lunacy".
 
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Ghost In The Machine said:
Was talking to a copper once who said at the local station they always knew when it was a full moon because more people acted stupidly.
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A&E is always geared up for extra madness at full moon as it "brings out the crazies", to quote the In House GP (who did many stints down in ED during his training.)
 
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What I found when working in education/care/psychiatric/secure environments was that challenging behaviour was retrofitted to the weather or moon phase and given as an explanation after the event.
 
Impybat said:
I worked at a behavioral school and can confirm the full moon effects!
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I worked in a gas station/stop 'n' rob across from a mental health center. A few of the counselors were regulars, and we'd warn each other early if "the crazies" were out that day. "Must be a full moon," is what we'd say to each other. No, I never did check the moon phase until I got home that day, but yeah, worst days were always either a day before, the day of, or the day after a full moon.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's anecdotal at best, but when you can set your clock by it, it tends to have meaning.
 
MercuryCrest said:
I worked in a gas station/stop 'n' rob across from a mental health center. A few of the counselors were regulars, and we'd warn each other early if "the crazies" were out that day. "Must be a full moon," is what we'd say to each other. No, I never did check the moon phase until I got home that day, but yeah, worst days were always either a day before, the day of, or the day after a full moon.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it's anecdotal at best, but when you can set your clock by it, it tends to have meaning.
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Well, at the risk of revealing more of my weird life experiences, I can add a little bit of research to the mix. My mother (who was extremely sensitive) had various health problems and in around 1977 I noticed for the first time that her erratic behaviour seemed to vary systematically from week to week. I decided to do a very informal study, at the end of each day I would rate her mental state on a 5 point scale. I deliberately waited a few weeks before looking more closely at the figures. The pattern that emerged was unexpectedly clear. Her ratings plotted on graph paper varied in a perfect sine curve. Periods of very poor behaviour/thinking had maxima two days after the full moon, and to a lesser degree two days after the new moon. When I went back a few years looking at my diaries, I found that all her really bad episodes had happened two days after a full moon. I don't claim that this is in itself conclusive, but what is to stop anyone in a situation where they suspect some such relationship to do the same, preferably gettings ratings from several observers for each subject?
 
Carl Grove said:
Well, at the risk of revealing more of my weird life experiences, I can add a little bit of research to the mix. My mother (who was extremely sensitive) had various health problems and in around 1977 I noticed for the first time that her erratic behaviour seemed to vary systematically from week to week. I decided to do a very informal study, at the end of each day I would rate her mental state on a 5 point scale. I deliberately waited a few weeks before looking more closely at the figures. The pattern that emerged was unexpectedly clear. Her ratings plotted on graph paper varied in a perfect sine curve. Periods of very poor behaviour/thinking had maxima two days after the full moon, and to a lesser degree two days after the new moon. When I went back a few years looking at my diaries, I found that all her really bad episodes had happened two days after a full moon. I don't claim that this is in itself conclusive, but what is to stop anyone in a situation where they suspect some such relationship to do the same, preferably gettings ratings from several observers for each subject?
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How interesting! Especially in the sense that your approach to the problem was quite simple. I guess it's true that sometimes the most straightforward ideas are the best. As a side note, I wonder how many people keep mood diaries but never discover or even attempt to link trends in their mood to external factors, whether lunar or otherwise!
 
Cloudbusting said:
How interesting! Especially in the sense that your approach to the problem was quite simple. I guess it's true that sometimes the most straightforward ideas are the best. As a side note, I wonder how many people keep mood diaries but never discover or even attempt to link trends in their mood to external factors, whether lunar or otherwise!
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/raises hand

I do. Tangentally related, but I try to journal every day whether it's to record my dreams if I'm fortunate enough to remember them, along with anything noteworthy that happened that day such as observations after meditating, any synchronicity I experienced, animals I saw, anything interesting. Admittedly some of it can be too weird even for this forum.
 
Interesting stuff here. I've read about studies where women slept in rooms that had lighting set up to simulate the lunar cycle, with varying amounts of light depending on the phase of the moon. Supposedly, their menstrual cycles soon adjusted to correlate exactly with the lunar phase. I don't know how reliable the data is. I probably read about it in a book written by a self-taught researcher, since I consumed those like Doritos in my younger days.

Speaking of such books with dubious or at least presumably oversimplified conclusions, I read a book about "biorhythms" when I was about 19. The idea is that we are slaves to three sine waves of various frequency, governing our physical, mental, and emotional states. These cycles begin at the time of our birth, and travel up to a peak and then down to the trough, soon diverging so that every day has a different mix of highs, lows, and mediums. There were handy charts and formulae for plotting your own biorhythms. Even at that impressionable age, I thought that was quite a stretch. What happens if you are a sailor or pilot who travels around the world more often in one direction? Do the graphs get hopelessly out of whack, like some computer that insists it's 1983 whenever you start it up?

There were supposed times when you had better look out, because this immutable mechanism was about to give you a "triple critical" day, where all three of your waves met at the baseline on their way down. There were other less dangerous times with mitigated negative energy but still something to look out for. Of course you were supposed to be at the height of your powers when the waves were high. So I plotted my charts for the current period and didn't find much to support the theory. Then I recalled a day a few months prior when I suddenly fell ill at work, went home early, and probably would have ended up in the hospital if we had had one. I was sick for a week, camped out on my parents' couch with a wastebasket close by since I was violently ill for a couple of those days. Dad brought me some Tylenol at about two o'clock one morning, having gone down to the pharmacy and rattled the door, since he knew the pharmacist did his bookkeeping in the middle of the night (It really was a different world then). I don't think I had yet heard of Tylenol. I took some, and soon thought I was dead. It somehow made my situation worse. It wasn't long after that when people actually did die after taking it, because of some moron adding cyanide to bottles and putting it back on the shelf somewhere. I have taken it a few times since the 70s, but it seldom does anything for me.

Anyway, yes, you guessed it. It was easy enough to figure out what day, at 2:00 pm, I was hit with what may have been food poisoning though there was no obvious cause of that. I plotted my curves for that day and yep, triple critical with all three waves on their way down. I threw that episode into my "grey basket" even though it was decades later I heard Stan Friedman use the term. On to the next book about some woo or other. Still I think there is something there, if we could suss the subtleties of the universe. Or Matrix, whatever.
 
Part of the reason I've been a little more meticulous about recording my very vivid dreams is because I think that I dream more vividly when the moon is in a certain phase, and I've been trying to track it.
 
catseye said:
Part of the reason I've been a little more meticulous about recording my very vivid dreams is because I think that I dream more vividly when the moon is in a certain phase, and I've been trying to track it.
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Been diarying my dreams for about 2 years now and never thought of looking at the lunar angle - tbh I am sceptical about lunar influence, but will definitely be looking into it now. Cheers!
 
escargot said:
What I found when working in education/care/psychiatric/secure environments was that challenging behaviour was retrofitted to the weather or moon phase and given as an explanation after the event.
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Yes, I guess it's human nature to look for an explanation lol. Remember a local news item a few years back about troubled teens and some new police initiative to pretend they were their friends or something. And in the shots of the troubled lads there sat my old neighbour's son... Those were the same cop shop as the one the copper who told me about the moon's effect, came from. I think in this kid's case, steroids were probably a bit more to blame.
 
In the past people were sure the moon made people crazy thus the word “ lunatic “.

In the King James Version of the Bible in the Gospel of Matthews uses the word to represent “ epilepsy “.
 
Impybat said:
I worked at a behavioral school and can confirm the full moon effects!
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The only psychopath (in the real sense of the word) that I ever met - Christopher Gore (sic) - murdered both his parents on the night of a full moon, and was also questioned over two other killings that took place during nights of the full moon.

He was an aquaintance of my brother and on the one or two occasions I met him, it was clear he was, er, 'troubled', 'strange', 'other'. He was not somebody going to blend in as there was something 'off' about him.

He's now serving an indefinite sentence in Broadmoor.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...s-Now-scientists-try-explain--moonstruck.html
 
cycleboy2 said:
…Christopher Gore (sic) - murdered both his parents on the night of a full moon, and was also questioned over two other killings that took place during nights of the full moon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...s-Now-scientists-try-explain--moonstruck.html
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l’d never heard of this nutter, but the alleged connection with the moon suggested some research.

Gore murdered his parents “on the morning of 9th September 1991”. According to Moon Phases UK, the moon was “waxing crescent”, i.e. looked like this:

waxing-crescent-moon-in-the-forest-dan-sproul.jpg


Carmel Gamble - one of the other murders for which he’s a suspect - was murdered on 11.11.89, the night before a full moon.

The murder of Melanie Road, the other potential Gore victim, was cleared up by a DNA match, and Christopher Hampton is now serving 22 years for it. (The moon was “waxing gibbous” on 8.6.84, the night of the crime.)

waxing-gibbous-moon-quarter-black-night-sky-36000536.jpg


maximus otter
 
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