[KG8]

In my younger days I never gave it much thought, but as the years rolled on and the data compounded, I began to see a pattern emerging. As young mates we would often go on "blinders" and drink for half the night, sometimes till the very dawn itself. Then a day or so later when the hangovers had passed we would look up, see the waning moon and say "Arrr it was the bloody full moon again." Some years later my mother was to take a job in a nursing home and she would comment on how the doses of drugs would always have to be increased over the full moon, else there would be bedlam in the wards as the mentally impaired old folk began ranting and wandering about.
How many of us begin to feel restless over this period? I know I have fits of aggression myself. They come out of nowhere and I feel like smashing the laptop or driving my car up the back of that slow poke in front of me! Madness? Quite possibly, but only temporary, short lived bursts. Studies have been done, like the patterns of murders.

MURDER TIDES
At the University of Miami, psychologist Arnold Lieber and his colleagues decided to test the old belief of full-moon "lunacy" which most scientists had written off as an old wives’ tale. The researchers collected data on homicide in Dade County (Miami) over a period of 15 years — 1,887 murders, to be exact. When they matched the incidence of homicide with the phases of the moon, they found, much to their surprise, that the two rose and fell together, almost infallibly, for the entire 15 years! As the full or the new moon approached, the murder rate rose sharply; it distinctly declined during the first and last quarters of the moon.
To find out whether this was just a statistical fluke, the researchers repeated the experiment using murder data from Cuyahoga County in Ohio (Cleveland). Again, the statistics showed that more murders do indeed occur at the full and new moons.
http://www.innerself.com/Astrology/full_moon.htm

The opposite effect is also true of the new moon it seems and people are calmer and more relaxed. No doubt this is a good thing for us as amateur astronomers, who like to gather together under the new moon, for days on end.