Beware the Full Moon

Have you ever wondered why is it that at specific moments during a month, tempers flare, tension is thick and everyone just wants to kill each other? I certainly have. For females, it's called pms, but how do you explain the males? What's up with them? It's the FULL MOON.

Just about all the males in our office have been moody this week. My boss hasn't spoken to me at all today - that's when I know he is in a bad mood. He sits in his office and sulks. And we all know to stay out of his way, lest we want to feel the full force of his wrath.

I didn't even know there was a full moon till one of my colleagues pointed it out at our coffee break this morning. She mentioned that she has noticed people in shopping centre parking lots fighting over a parking spaces these past few days. It's madness. My other colleague, has been having first hand experience with this, the poor soul. Her father has been in one of the worst moods ever, finding fault in every little thing.

There's something about a full moon that conjures up spooky images of werewolves, insane axe-wielding murderers and other odd and unexplainable behaviors. Everything from horror films to Halloween cards has capitalized on this phenomenon, making it almost commonplace in our minds. But does the moon really affect human behavior, or does this notion only exist in our imaginations?

I haven't done too much research on this, but apparently there are no scientific studies that prove a correlation between the full moon and mood swings. However, in England in the 18th century, a person who committed a murder during a full moon could plead "lunacy" and get a lighter sentence. Lunacy is defined as "intermittent insanity once believed to be related to phases of the moon."

Back in the 1970s, a study was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry that found some interesting results. Homicides in Dade County, Florida appeared to rise and fall with the phases of the moon over a 15-year period. In other words, the murder rate rose with the full or new moon. The study's author, psychiatrist Arnold Lieber, theorized that since humans are composed mostly of water (like the earth), our bodies might have "biological tides" that influence our emotions.

There have been several other studies that have been conducted but results seem to contradict each other. So does the full moon really affect us or not? Is it possible that we, as a culture, like the idea of a mysterious moon-related power, and are pushing the myth forward because we want to? I think that what actually happens is that when there is a full moon and something out of the ordinary happens, we tend to blame it on the moon. So is it myth or fact?