The start of the work week is typically associated with blue feelings, but the weekend could actually be worse for our moods. The following chart comes from Alpaslan Akay and Peter Martinsson, who looked at how Germans rated themselves on an 11-point scale of feelings of well-being, broken down by day of the week:
Akay and Martinsson conclude:
Our results suggest that overall subjective well-being is largely influenced by the day of the week it is reported. We find that Sunday is the bluest day in Germany; i.e. this is the day that individuals on average report the lowest level of subjective well-being. Saturday and Friday are the other two days that individuals report lower subjective well-being. Hence, weekends result in lower subjective well-being than weekdays... A separate analysis based on different socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of individuals reveals that there are different weekly patterns of subjective well-being, where the most pronounced effect is found among married and middle-aged people.
I wanted to see if there was something similar going on in the U.S., so I pulled data from the 2008 wave of the General Social Survey. This chart shows the percentage of people who said they were "Very Happy" or "Pretty Happy" in response to the question "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days--would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"
I didn't control for any demographic factors, so the pattern could be driven by things like marital status, employment, health, etc. Still, it looks like it might be time for the Bangles to get back in the studio for a remix.