Sarah Romans

Who they are

The University of Otago lists Professor Sarah Romans in its Department of Psychological Medicine, Wellington, with interests including women's mental health, mood disorders and psychiatric epidemiology. The 2013 paper gives the same department as her affiliation.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Mood and the menstrual cycle (2013), with Kreindler, Asllani, Einstein, Laredo, Levitt, Morgan, Petrovic, Toner and Stewart. The paper begins from the point that the common belief in premenstrual mood symptoms is shaped by social expectations about gender, emotion and hormones, and that few studies have followed women prospectively through every phase of the cycle. A random sample of Canadian women aged 18 to 40 recorded their mood and health every day for six months, producing 395 complete cycles. Only half of the individual mood items showed any association with cycle phase, and these links were with menstruation itself, or menstruation together with the days before it, rather than with the premenstrual phase alone, with one exception. Physical health, perceived stress and social support were much stronger predictors of daily mood than cycle phase. The authors concluded that their results did not support the widespread idea of a specific premenstrual low mood in women.

Key ideas

The study shifts attention from the calendar to the circumstances of a woman's day. It does not rule out premenstrual syndrome as a condition in some women, which other research supports, but it suggests that in the general population the cycle explains much less of mood than is commonly assumed.

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