When Kari Leibowitz arrived in Tromsø, she thought she knew what the question was.
She had come north from Stanford to study how people managed a winter in which the sun disappears below the horizon for roughly two months. The obvious assumption was that residents endured the darkness. What surprised her was how often they spoke as though winter were approaching with gifts of its own.
There would be skiing, snow and the blue light of midday twilight. There would be warm rooms and time with other people. There would also be cold pavements, tired mornings and weeks without direct sunlight. The point was not that winter lacked difficulty. It was that difficulty was not the only thing people expected to find.
That mismatch between Leibowitz’s expectation and the local conversation became a study. Its result is unusually memorable: across three Norwegian regions, the people living farther north tended to view winter more positively, and those with the most positive winter views also tended to report more satisfying lives.
It is tempting to turn that into a neat instruction to love the cold. The actual evidence is more interesting, and much more modest.
A year in Tromsø became a different research question
The “year” in the headline was a ten-month Fulbright stay, from August to May, at the University of Tromsø. Leibowitz was then a Stanford social-psychology researcher. She worked with UiT psychologist Joar Vittersø, whose research included happiness and the quality of life.
Tromsø sits at about 69 degrees north. In deep winter the sun remains below the horizon from around mid-November to mid-January, although the city is not pitch black all day. There can be between two and five hours of civil twilight, with the sun travelling just beneath the horizon.
Leibowitz had originally been interested in why research did not consistently find the extreme seasonal distress that outsiders might expect at such a latitude. Conversations in Tromsø shifted her focus from the absence of illness to the presence of positive experience.
As she later explained in a Stanford account of the work, residents did not talk about winter only as something to survive. They also described activities and kinds of light they genuinely valued.
That distinction matters. The observation did not itself prove a Norwegian psychological advantage. It gave the researchers a clearer question to test.
The researchers had to invent a way to measure wintertime mindset
There was no established questionnaire for the overall meaning a person gives winter, so Leibowitz and Vittersø built one. Discussions with Norwegian and international residents of Tromsø supplied the themes.
The resulting Wintertime Mindset Scale contained ten statements. Six expressed positive associations, such as winter being beautiful, cozy or full of activities available only at that time of year. Four expressed negative associations, including feeling more tired, finding the months depressing or often not wanting to do anything.
Participants rated each statement from one to five. After the negative items were reverse-scored, a higher average represented a more positive relationship with winter.
The survey also used established measures of life satisfaction, positive emotions and negative emotions. Additional questions measured flourishing and personal growth, giving the researchers several ways to ask whether a winter attitude travelled alongside broader wellbeing.
This was not a quiz in whether somebody knew the approved Nordic answer. It tried to quantify an orientation: what comes to mind when winter arrives, what a person expects from it and which parts of the season receive most attention.
The sample stretched from Oslo to the polar night in Svalbard
On 5 January 2015, the researchers mailed invitations to 1,500 randomly chosen postal addresses. Five hundred were in Oslo, five hundred in Troms county, which contains Tromsø, and five hundred in Svalbard, primarily around Longyearbyen.
People completed the online questionnaire between 16 January and 7 February. That interval caught the end of Tromsø’s polar night and a period when Svalbard still received almost no daily light.
A total of 238 people responded, for a response rate of 15.9 per cent. The returned sample was almost evenly split among southern Norway, northern Norway and Svalbard. Its estimated mean age was 46, 45 per cent were men and 93 per cent reported being born in Norway to Norwegian parents.
Those figures make the design easier to understand. Addresses were randomly selected, but the people who chose to answer were not a random cross-section of everyone who received a letter. Depending on missing responses, the main analyses used between 213 and 227 participants.
The study, published in 2020 in the International Journal of Wellbeing, is best read as an exploratory survey with an unusually evocative geography, not as a final census of Norwegian attitudes.
Attitudes became warmer as the map moved north
The average wintertime-mindset score was 3.34 out of five in Oslo, 3.58 in Troms and 4.01 in Svalbard. Across the sample, latitude and a positive winter view were moderately correlated.
The straightforward comparison found Svalbard significantly above both Oslo and Troms. The raw Oslo-Troms difference did not reach the conventional threshold for statistical significance. In a more complex model that treated wintertime mindset as an unobserved trait measured through the ten answers, however, both Troms and Svalbard scored significantly above Oslo.
That is the careful version of the northward pattern. It was strongest at the Arctic extreme, and it appeared across the full statistical model. It was not a perfectly even stairway in every test.
Svalbard also presents an obvious selection issue. Many residents move there for months or years rather than remaining for a lifetime. Someone who voluntarily chooses Longyearbyen may already be unusually comfortable with cold, darkness, isolation or outdoor life.
Troms offered a less extreme comparison. The researchers noted that average winter temperatures in Oslo and Tromsø were both around minus 4 degrees Celsius, even though Tromsø had dramatically less direct sunlight. Latitude therefore changed the light more cleanly than it changed the temperature between those two regions.
The most positive winter views travelled with greater wellbeing
Wintertime mindset was associated with every wellbeing measure the researchers examined. People who saw winter more positively tended to report greater life satisfaction and more positive emotion. They also reported less negative emotion and higher flourishing and personal growth.
But wellbeing itself did not simply increase with latitude. Average life satisfaction, positive emotion and negative emotion showed no statistically significant differences among Oslo, Troms and Svalbard in the basic location comparisons.
The pattern was subtler: northern location was associated with a more positive winter mindset, and that mindset was associated with wellbeing. A structural model found an indirect pathway from location to wellbeing through mindset, but no independent direct link from latitude to wellbeing.
The authors used the language of statistical mediation. In a one-time observational survey, that does not establish a causal chain. A diagram can be consistent with a theory without proving that events occur in that order.
This distinction echoes our earlier look at Finland’s winter and happiness ranking. Weather, immediate emotion and an overall judgement of life are related ideas, but they are not interchangeable measures.
The study could not determine which feeling came first
Perhaps expecting beauty and possibility makes people more likely to go outside, meet friends, notice the soft light or organise winter activities. Those behaviours could make the season better and, over time, support wellbeing.
Yet the arrow could point the other way. People already satisfied with their lives may interpret inconvenience more generously. A supportive community, secure housing, good health, suitable clothing, free time or affection for outdoor activity could produce both a warmer winter attitude and higher life satisfaction.
The researchers were direct about this uncertainty. Their survey was cross-sectional, meaning each person was measured once. It included no random assignment, no attempt to change mindset and no follow-up showing that one variable changed before another.
The low response rate adds another limit. People willing to complete a winter questionnaire in midwinter may have had more interest in the season, and perhaps more enthusiasm for it, than people who ignored the invitation. The authors could not guarantee that their sample represented the three regions.
They also had no summer comparison. Without asking the same people again, the study could not show how stable wintertime mindset was across the year or whether the relationship with wellbeing strengthened during darkness.
Our previous piece on people who find a first Nordic winter restorative explored the lived experience. This study adds a useful measurement, but it still leaves culture, resources, personality and self-selection closely entangled.
A positive mindset is not an order to deny a hard season
Leibowitz and Vittersø did not measure seasonal affective disorder or diagnose mental distress. They specifically warned against suggesting that a clinical condition is merely a poor attitude, or that somebody struggling through winter can simply snap out of it.
That warning protects the most useful interpretation of mindset. A person can recognise cold, fatigue and darkness while also noticing beauty, community or season-specific pleasures. A wider frame is different from pretending the difficult half of reality is absent.
Material conditions set boundaries too. Winter is easier to appreciate from a warm, secure home than from unsafe housing. Skiing requires access, equipment, health and time. Soft twilight is easier to notice when work allows someone to be outdoors during the few light hours.
Community may be part of the mechanism. In a place where friends expect to meet outside, where clothing and infrastructure are designed for the season and where complaining is not the only public story about winter, positive experiences are easier to find and share.
This is why the result should not be reduced to private optimism. The mindset measured inside individuals may partly reflect the culture, habits and physical arrangements built around them.
The darkest winter need not have the bleakest meaning
The study did not show that Norwegians possess a secret immunity to winter. It showed that 238 respondents living across an unusual range of latitudes did not relate to the same season in the same way.
Those farthest north tended to hold the warmest attitudes, especially in Svalbard. Across the sample, those attitudes travelled with greater life satisfaction. Neither result tells us that moving north creates happiness or that deciding to like January will transform a life.
What it does suggest is quieter. A season reaches us as more than weather. It arrives through expectations, language, routines, invitations and the examples of people around us.
Tromsø did not persuade Leibowitz that darkness was secretly light. It showed her that darkness could contain several experiences at once, and that a community could become practised at making room for the better ones.
That may be the most honest lesson in the northward pattern: winter does not become easy because people call it beautiful, but its hardest facts do not have to supply its only meaning.