Physical Warmth Research Articles

Replication of “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth” by

We report the results of three high-powered, independent replications of Study 2 from Williams and Bargh (2008) . Participants evaluated hot or cold instant therapeutic packs before choosing a reward for participation that was framed as a prosocial (i.e., treat for a friend) or self-interested reward (i.e., treat for the self). Williams and Bargh predicted that evaluating the hot pack would lead to a higher probability of making a prosocial choice compared to evaluating the cold pack. We did not replicate the effect in any individual laboratory or when considering the results of the three replications together (total N = 861). We conclude that there is no evidence that brief exposure to warm therapeutic packs induces greater prosocial responding than exposure to cold therapeutic packs.

Perceptual symbols of creativity: Coldness elicits referential, warmth elicits relational creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and contrasting from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm=relational) and referential (cold=distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warm cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

Social context modulates the effect of physical warmth on perceived interpersonal kindness: a study of embodied metaphors

abstractPhysical contact with hot vs. iced coffee has been shown to affect evaluation of the personal warmth or kindness of a hypothetical person (Williams & Bargh, 2008). In three studies, we investigated whether the manipulation of social context can modulate the activation of the metaphorical mapping, kindness as warmth. After priming participants with warm vs. cold temperature, we asked them to evaluate a hypothetical ad-hoc ally or adversary on the kindness dimension, as well as on other qualities used as a control. We expected more extreme evaluations of kindness in the adversary than in the ally condition, and no effects on other ratings. We thus replicated the classical effect of physical warmth on kindness ratings and generalized it to a German-speaking population. In addition, when the two German studies were combined, we found evidence suggesting a contextual modulation of the temperature effect: only out-group members, namely adversaries, were judged as more kind when participants had experienced physical warmth; the effect was not evident in the ally (i.e., in-group) condition. These studies suggest that context can modulate metaphorical activation; they therefore represent an initial attempt to add nuance to our understanding of when embodied metaphors affect our decisions.

Supplemental Material for Can Physical Warmth (or Coldness) Predict Trait Loneliness? A Replication of Bargh and Shalev (2012)

Supplemental Material for Can Physical Warmth (or Coldness) Predict Trait Loneliness? A Replication of Bargh and Shalev (2012)

Embodied motivation: using a goal systems framework to understand the preference for social and physical warmth.

Embodiment research has primarily focused on metaphor-assimilative effects (e.g., perceiving someone to be socially warmer when holding a warm object). Research shows these effects can occur by activating metaphor-associated knowledge constructs. This account is not sufficient, however, for explaining complementary effects--for example, the tendency to prefer social warmth when experiencing physical coldness (Experiment 1). We suggest that socially warm events are considered a means for achieving the goal of reducing physical coldness. Guided by this basic hypothesis and the principles of a goal systems framework, we examine whether the basic relationship between goals and means explains complementary embodiment effects. We find that socially warm activities are preferred over control activities when people are primed with the goal of reducing physical coldness, but not when primed with the concept of coldness (Experiment 2). We also find that activating an alternative goal decreases the attractiveness of socially warm activities when people are feeling cold (Experiment 3). Finally, we examine the effect of social coldness on preferences for physical warmth, showing that the attractiveness of physically warm items among socially excluded people is decreased by activating an alternative goal (Experiment 4). These results suggest that complementary embodiment effects follow the principles of goal activation.

Physical Warmth and Perceptual Focus: A Replication of IJzerman and Semin (2009)

With the changing of modal research practices in psychology, the grounded cognition perspective (sometimes categorized under the more popular term of “social priming”) has become heavily criticized. Specifically, LeBel and Campbell (2013) reported a failed replication of a study involving what some would call ‘social priming’. We sought to replicate a study from our own lab (IJzerman & Semin, 2009), to investigate the reproducibility of the reported effect that physical warmth leads to a greater focus on perceptual relations. We also improved our methods to reduce potential experimenter’s bias (cf. Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012). We successfully replicated the finding that a simple cue of physical warmth makes people more likely to adopt a relational focus.

On the Association between Loneliness and Physical Warmth-Seeking through Bathing: Reply to Donellan et al. (2014) and Three Further Replications of Bargh & Shalev (2012) Study 1.

As Tversky and Kahneman (1971) noted, effect sizes in smaller samples are inherently unstable. Donellan et al. (2014) in a large sample show that the relation between trait loneliness and warmth extraction through bathing activities is much smaller than in our initial smaller samples. We report further replications of our original findings in samples from India, Israel, and North America, again showing significant correlations between loneliness and physical warmth extraction from bathing and showering; the overall effect being reliable across all three samples, although, consistent with Donellan et al.'s conclusions, smaller than in our original studies. We also respond to criticisms of the original data analyses, noting that removal of the problematic 'bathing frequency' item from the warmth index did not substantially change the results and thus our conclusions from them. We also note that in their 2 studies in which Donellan et al. attempted to most closely follow our original procedure, they did replicate our original results, but not in the other 7 studies in which considerable procedural changes were made. As our new replications reveal variability in bathing and showering preferences and habits around the world, we recommend the inclusion of a wider sample of cultures beyond North American in future research. This research should also focus not only on the narrower question of how loneliness relates to bathing activities but on the broader relation between feelings of social coldness (e.g., after rejection or exclusion) and the seeking of physical warmth (e.g., warm food and drink, thermostat settings).

The temperature premium: Warm temperatures increase product valuation

A series of five field and laboratory studies reveal a temperature-premium effect: warm temperatures increase individuals' valuation of products. We demonstrate the effect across a variety of products using different approaches to measure or manipulate physical warmth and different assessments of product valuation. The studies suggest that exposure to physical warmth activates the concept of emotional warmth, eliciting positive reactions and increasing product valuation. Further supporting the causal role of emotional warmth, and following prior research relating greater positive feelings to reduced distance, we find that warm temperatures also reduce individuals' perceived distance from the target products.

Loneliness, Warmth-Seeking Behavior, and Posttraumatic Stress Among Survivors of the Sichuan Earthquake

We examined: a) different correlation patterns between loneliness and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom structures, and b) the relationship between loneliness and physical coldness/warmth-seeking behavior among people with PTSD. Participants were divided into a PTSD group and a control group and after completing a loneliness-priming task, the PTSD group also took part in a temperature evaluation experiment. Control subjects completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale but not the temperature evaluation experiment. We found that reported levels of loneliness were significantly higher in the PTSD participant group than in the controls, and dysphoric arousal and numbing factors were significant predictors of loneliness. These data indicate that loneliness is closely associated with depression-related PTSD symptom constructs in people diagnosed with PTSD. The PTSD participant group estimated the temperature in the room to be lower than the actual values, and preferred hot soup to control food/drink presented at room temperature. The implications of the relationships among loneliness, physical warmth, and psychological/interpersonal warmth on PTSD therapy are discussed.

Embodied cognition and social consumption: Self-regulating temperature through social products and behaviors

Extant embodied cognition research suggests that individuals can reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by substituting physical warmth, and vice versa. We suggest that this behavior is self-regulatory in nature and that this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumptive behavior. Experiment 1 found that consumers perceived ambient temperature to be significantly lower when eating alone compared to eating with a partner. Experiment 2 found that consuming a cool (vs. warm) drink led individuals to generate more socially-oriented attributes for a hypothetical product. Experiment 3 found that physically cooler individuals desired a social consumption setting, whereas physically warmer individuals desired a lone consumption setting. We interpret these results within the context of self-regulation, such that perceived physical temperature deviations from a steady state unconsciously motivate the individual to find bodily balance in order to alleviate that deviation.

Shared Neural Mechanisms Underlying Social Warmth and Physical Warmth

Many of people’s closest bonds grow out of socially warm exchanges and the warm feelings associated with being socially connected. Indeed, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying thermoregulation may be shared by those that regulate social warmth, the experience of feeling connected to other people. To test this possibility, we placed participants in a functional MRI scanner and asked them to (a) read socially warm and neutral messages from friends and family and (b) hold warm and neutral-temperature objects (a warm pack and a ball, respectively). Findings showed an overlap between physical and social warmth: Participants felt warmer after reading the positive (compared with neutral) messages and more connected after holding the warm pack (compared with the ball). In addition, neural activity during social warmth overlapped with neural activity during physical warmth in the ventral striatum and middle insula, but neural activity did not overlap during another pleasant task (soft touch). Together, these results suggest that a common neural mechanism underlies physical and social warmth.

Perceptual Symbols of Creativity: Coldness Elicits Referential, Warmth Elicits Relational Creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and the distancing from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm = relational) and referential (cold = distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warmth cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.

Inferences Are For Doing

Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are ubiquitous and occur when perceivers spontaneously infer actor traits from actor behaviors. Previous research has elucidated the processes underlying STIs, but little work has focused on the functions of STIs. This article proposes that these unintentional early inferences serve a general approach or avoidance function. Two studies are reported in which external approach and avoidance motivations elicited via flexion-extension (Study 1) or physical warmth (Study 2) affect the encoding of trait-implying behavioral statements in a valence-matching manner. The results suggest that somatic states can act as cues that affect unintentional social information processing independently of the actual experience of the psychological states associated with those somatic states. Implications for a functional perspective on STIs are discussed.

Caring for Sharing

Does physical warmth lead to caring and sharing? Research suggests that it does; physically warm versus cold conditions induce prosocial behaviors and cognitions. Importantly, previous research has not traced the developmental origins of the association between physical warmth and affection. The association between physical warmth and sharing may be captured in specific cognitive models of close social relations, often referred to as attachment styles. In line with this notion, and using a dictator game set-up, the current study demonstrates that children who relate to their friends with a secure attachment style are more generous toward their peers in warm than in cold conditions. This effect was absent for children who relate to friends with an insecure attachment style. Notably, however, these children not just always shared less: They allocated more stickers to a friend than to a stranger. These findings provide an important first step to understand how fundamental embodied relations develop early in life. We discuss broader implications for grounded cognition and person perception.

The Effects of Temperature Priming on Cooperation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

Based on initial research findings by Williams and Bargh (2008) and Kang, Williams, Clark, Gray and Bargh (2011) on the interaction between interpersonal and physical warmth, theoretical models such as cognitive scaffolding and the importance of evaluations of interpersonal warmth in trust-based decisions, this experiment investigated the effect of temperature priming on 30 pairs of British university students with hot and cold objects on frequency of cooperation in a game of iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Participants were found to cooperate significantly more frequently when primed with hot objects than with cold objects, supporting the assertion that physical warmth sensation positively affects interpersonal trust evaluation. No support was found for the prediction that male-male pairs would cooperate less than female-female pairs. The implications of these findings to evolutionary and developmental theories of interpersonal warmth are discussed.

The Big Two in Social Judgment and Behavior

One of the most significant developments in research on social judgment was the realization that the same two fundamental content dimensions underlie judgments of the self, others, social groups, nations, cultures, faces, etc. These two fundamental dimensions are also called the “Big Two.” They denote two “modes of existence” (Bakan, 1966), namely, social relatedness (“communion”; alsocalled warmth, morality, expressiveness, affiliation) and individual strivings (“agency,” also-called competence, instrumentality, power). These “Big Two” have the potential to integrate different lines of research in psychology, and they are also relevant in numerous applied contexts. Most important for research on social information processing, the “Big Two” advance our knowledge on the role that content plays in information processing. This special issue of Social Psychology stems from a conference on the “Big Two” held in Erlangen, Germany, in 2010, and it continues a special issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology that was also devoted to the fundamental dimensions of social judgment (guest editors: Andrea E. Abele, Amy Cuddy, Charles Judd, and Vincent Yzerbyt). Our call for papers to the present special issue resulted in 26 submissions – and it proved very difficult to select only those 12 papers that seemed best suited for the present volume and could finally be accepted in October/ November 2012. Bruckmuller and Abele study the representation of agency and communion terms and show that negative terms related to the communion dimension are more densely clustered than both positive communion items and agency items in general. Radkiewicz, Skarzynska, and Hamer show that general opinions about people’s communion and agency are strongly related to how negativistic worldviews are, with the latter being most negative among respondents who think that people are highly agentic but low in communion/morality. The two papers by Abele and Brack as well as Wojciszke and Sobiczewska are concerned with a theoretical model assuming actor/observer differences in the “profitability” of agentic and communal traits, that is, that agentic traits are mainly profitable for the trait possessor (actor), while communal traits are profitable for the surrounding others (observers; see Peeters, 1992). Abele and Brack show that the communal trait of “trustworthiness” is of special importance when interacting with another person, and that the valuation of others’ agentic traits varies with the kind of relationship. Wojciszke and Sobiczewska show that self-evaluations are dominated by agentic content, whereas other evaluations rely on both kinds of content. Bi, Ybarra, and Zhao show that this agency-dominated perspective on self-esteem also holds in the cultural context of China. Moreover, these authors combine the agency/communion perspective with the perspective of genderstereotypic traits. Gender-stereotypic traits are also the focus of De Lemus, Spear, Bukowski, Moya, and Lupianez, who demonstrate a somewhat counterintuitive effect that women exposed to traditional gender roles activate stereotype-inconsistent traits faster than stereotype-consistent ones. Bertolotti, Catellani, Douglas, and Sutton show how defensive communication (involving downward and upward counterfactuals) influences the perception of politicians’ agency and morality, and how this influence is moderated by the participants’ level of political sophistication. Siman Tov-Nachlieli, Schnabel, and Nadler show that, following transgressions, victimized groups or individuals experience threats to their agency (and attempt to restore this facet of their identity), while perpetrating groups or individuals experience threats to their communion (and are motivated to restore this aspect of their identity). Cislak extends the Big Two to power relations showing that high power increases interest in and preference for agentic virtues in others which is mediated by increases in a task (versus relationships) orientation. The final three papers connect the Big Two with embodied information processing. In a series of experiments, Schubert, Schubert, and Topolinski show that spatial elevation can both increase and decrease respect (an agency-based attitudinal response) depending on whether the elevation is substantiated by the elevated person’s achievement or not. Building on previous findings that physical warmth induces prosociality, IJzerman, Karremans, Thomsen, and Schubert show that children with a secure attachment to their friends tend to be more generous

Imagined sensory experiences can shape person perception: It's a matter of visual perspective

Psychological warmth serves as a fundamental dimension of human social cognition. From impressions of strangers to appraisals of groups, assessments of warmth (vs. coldness) comprise an elemental building block of social perception. Using embodiment as a guiding framework, research has demonstrated that perceptions of others along the warm-cold dimension can be elicited by sensory experiences (e.g., physical warmth). Here we show that effects of this kind can also be triggered by mentally simulating physical temperature, but only under certain theoretically important imagery conditions. Specifically, impressions of a target were impacted by imagined warmth or coldness (i.e., thinking about holding a cup of hot/iced coffee) only when an event was simulated from an egocentric (i.e., first-person) perspective. No such effect emerged when an allocentric (i.e., third-person) orientation was adopted. This finding underscores the functional nature of mental simulation and identifies spatial visual perspective as a critical boundary condition of embodied cognition.

Warmth, spatial proximity, and social attachment: The embodied perception of a social metaphor

Recent experiments in embodied social cognition suggest a fundamental link between physical warmth and social affiliation. Findings from two experiments support the hypothesis that physical warmth serves as a symbolic cue signaling the close proximity of a source of affiliation. In Experiment 1, participants perceived a warm object as being physically closer than a cold object. In Experiment 2, being primed with warmth led participants to display higher levels of self-reported social affiliative motivation. In both studies, effects were moderated by individual differences in attachment style; priming effects were pronounced among those low in attachment avoidance and those high in attachment anxiety. These findings contribute to a growing literature suggesting deep connections between perception, physical experience, and social cognition.

Experiencing physical warmth promotes happiness

Experiencing physical warmth promotes happiness

Heartwarming memories: Nostalgia maintains physiological comfort.

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, is a predominantly positive and social emotion. Recent evidence suggests that nostalgia maintains psychological comfort. Here, we propose, and document in five methodologically diverse studies, a broader homeostatic function for nostalgia that also encompasses the maintenance of physiological comfort. We show that nostalgia--an emotion with a strong connotation of warmth--is triggered by coldness. Participants reported stronger nostalgia on colder (vs. warmer) days and in a cold (vs. neutral or warm) room. Nostalgia, in turn, modulates the interoceptive feeling of temperature. Higher levels of music-evoked nostalgia predicted increased physical warmth, and participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event perceived ambient temperature as higher. Finally, and consistent with the close central nervous system integration of temperature and pain sensations, participants who recalled a nostalgic (vs. ordinary autobiographical) event evinced greater tolerance to noxious cold.