Talking About Temperature and Social Thermoregulation in the Languages of the World

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm,Dmitry Nikolaev

doi:10.5334/irsp.410

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Dmitry Nikolaev

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.410

Copy DOI

Abstract

The last decade saw rapid growth of the body of work devoted to relations between social thermoregulation and various other domains, with a particular focus on the connection between prosociality and physical warmth. This paper reports on a first systematic cross-linguistic study of the exponents of conceptual metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Grady, 1997), which provides the motivation for the large share of research in this area. Assumed to be universal, it enables researchers, mostly speakers of major European languages, to treat words like warm and cold as self-evident and easily translatable between languages – both in their concrete uses (to feel warm/cold) and as applied to interpersonal relationships (a cold/warm person, warm feelings, etc.). Based on a sample of 94 languages from all around the world and using methodology borrowed from typological linguistics and mixed-effects regression modelling, we show that the relevant expressions show a remarkably skewed distribution and seem to be absent or extremely marginal in the majority of language families and linguistic macro-areas. The study demonstrates once again the dramatic influence of the Anglocentric, Standard Average European, and WEIRD perspectives on many of the central concepts and conclusions in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive research and discusses how changing this perspective can impact research in social psychology in general and in social thermoregulation in particular.

Highlights

On hearing that someone is warm, you will understand that we are talking about a friendly person, someone who shows affection and enthusiasm, and is in general fairly nice
To give a few examples, there are studies showing that daily perceptions of physical warmth co-fluctuate with feeling social (Fetterman et al, 2017), that diversity in social networks helps to protect core body temperature against the cold (IJzerman, Lindenberg, et al, 2018), and that coldness makes people think about loved ones (IJzerman, Neyroud, et al, 2018)
Defining the Object and the Main Questions of the Study As stated in the Introduction, the current paper aims to investigate to what extent linguistic manifestations of the affection is warmth metaphor are widely spread across the world’s languages

Summary

Introduction

On hearing that someone is warm, you will understand that we are talking about a friendly person, someone who shows affection and enthusiasm, and is in general fairly nice. In a seminal experiment by Williams and Bargh (2008), the participants who had held a warm versus cold beverage later appreciated other people as more versus less generous and caring (i.e., having a warmer or colder personality), providing evidence for a deeper association between prosociality and physical warmth. Similar results were obtained in conceptually related experiments, for example, the participants holding warm beverages in IJzerman and Semin (2009) judged themselves as emo-. To give a few examples, there are studies showing that daily perceptions of physical warmth co-fluctuate with feeling social (Fetterman et al, 2017), that diversity in social networks helps to protect core body temperature against the cold (IJzerman, Lindenberg, et al, 2018), and that coldness makes people think about loved ones (IJzerman, Neyroud, et al, 2018)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion