What do a chilly reception, a cold-blooded murder, and an icy stare have in common? Each plumbs the bulb of what could be called your social thermometer, exposing our reflexive tendency to conflate social judgments—estimations of another’s trust and intent — with the perception of temperature. Decades of fascinating cross-disciplinary studies have illuminated the surprising speed, pervasiveness and neurobiology of this unconscious mingling of the personal and the thermal.

The blurring of ‘heat’ and ‘greet’ is highlighted in a recent experiment by Ohio University’s Matthew Vess, who asked whether this tendency is influenced by an individual’s sensitivity to relational distress. They found that people high in the psychological attribute called attachment anxiety (a tendency to worry about the proximity and availability of a romantic partner) responded to memories of a relationship breakup with an increased preference for warm-temperature foods over cooler ones: soup over crackers. Subjects low in attachment anxiety — those more temperamentally secure — did not show this “comfort food” effect.

In a related part of the same experiment, subjects were asked to reconstruct jumbled words into sentences that had either cold or warm evocations. (Sentence reconstruction tasks involving specific themes are known to unconsciously influence subsequent behavior.) After being temperature-primed, Vess’s subjects rated their perceptions of their current romantic relationship. As in the first condition, subjects higher in attachment anxiety rated their relationship satisfaction higher when prompted with balmier phrases than with frosty ones.

 The fact that individual differences in a relationship-oriented trait (attachment anxiety) are related to a person’s sensitivity to unconscious temperature-related cues speaks to the “under the hood” unconscious mingling that occurs between our social perceptual system and our temperature perception system. Though people predisposed to worry about their relationships seem to be more sensitive to these cues, we are all predisposed to the blurring of different types of experience. Similar recent experiments have demonstrated, for example, that briefly holding a warm beverage buoys subsequent ratings of another’s personality, that social isolation sensitizes a person to all things chilly, that inappropriate social mimicry creates a sense of cold, and that differences in the setting of the experimental lab’s thermostat leads test subjects to construe social relationships differently.

 Vess’s experiments follow a much longer line of psychological research exploring the reasons people avoid a cold shoulder, lament a frigid partner and have to “cool off” after a spat. In point of fact, the mercury in our social minds has been of interest since at least the 1940’s, when landmark work on impression-formation by the pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated the “striking and consistent differences of impression” created by substituting the words “warm” and “cold” into a hypothetical person’s personality profile. Since then, a panoply of studies of social perception in a host of cultures have validated the centrality of these temperate anchors in forming rapid unconscious impressions of a person.

It will come as no surprise that the ultimate confluence of the thermal and the personal happens between our ears. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, for example, has noted that the neural machinery for attachment and bonding is actually cobbled together out of more primitive brain areas used for temperature regulation. Adding to this theme, the psychiatrist Myron Hofer’s seminal research in the 1970’s demonstrated that certain parameters of rodent maternal attachment behavior (e.g. variations in touch or warmth) act as “hidden regulators” of various physiological responses (e.g.digestion) in their pups. Around the same time, another psychiatrist, John Bowlby, penned his now-canon observations about the central importance of attachment for the social and psychological development of young humans, reminding us that we are just another part of a chain of mammals that depend on the care of others for survival.

7 Comments

1. 1. MadScientist72 08:49 AM 7/10/12

   If heat = good & cold = bad, then why does being "cool" have positive connotations, while "hot-headed" & "hot under the collar" have negative ones?

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2. 2. WRQ9 11:40 AM 7/10/12

   This (linguistic) tendency may be directly related to the study of molecular physical activity. Any increase in emotional energy, regardless of it's essential quality may, for the sake of simplicity, be interpreted as sharing sensory imagery with that physical change in the behavior of atoms. As there are many kinds of warmth and cool, from microwave excitation to body heat, the correlation seems strictly quantitative. At the same time even that relationship seems to be subject to curve due to specific inconsistencies and exaggeration.
   Synaesthesia also may be attributable to these relatively recent interpretations as qualities associated with the inherent energies of spectral radiation. Often times the mind makes associations that are not as precise as contextual physical reality must be in this area, due to the mutability of circumstance. This is only a small part of the weakness of language as a "stand alone" tool in the hopes of real communication. Quantitative relative scale, and imagery are both necessary accompaniments in sometimes the slightest communique.

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3. 3. thekenyanpaul 03:29 PM 7/10/12

   What a 'hot-headed' article... am sure none of the researchers are 'hot' either! Such studies are not 'cool' at all...

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4. 4. mmanivannan 05:54 PM 7/11/12

   It is possible that this kind of linguistic test may have cultural biases. In the hot and humid South India, at least in the state of Tamil Nadu, a warm or hot welcome is undesirable as expressed in the Tamil language (தமிழ்). A cool or sweet or loud (குளிர்ந்த, இனிய, பலத்த) welcome is the most desirable. One gets a cool hug (குளிர்ந்த அரவணைப்பு). A host welcomes you with cool face (குளிர்ந்த முகம்). Warmth and heat in general associate with conflict and coolness indicates friendship and care. The idiomatic Tamil equivalents of "chilly reception and an icy stare" might be "hot reception (சூடான வரவேற்பு)and burning stare(சுட்டெரிக்கும் பார்வை)." I hope these studies are also conducted in a different culture to identify such cultural biases.

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5. 5. cccampbell38 06:11 PM 7/11/12

   This is not rocket science folks. Examine your own physical reactions. Being aroused sexually increases the feeling of physical warmth. Thus, "hot"= "sexually stimulating". By the same token a temper tantrum increases the sensation of physical warmth. Therefore "hot under the collar"="furious".
   
   The phrase "cool" developed historically as an African American idiom that reflected the perceived difference in temperament between blacks and whites; whites were stereotypically seen as less excitable and therefore "cool", as in "cool as a cat" (ie. not very excitable). This was seen by some as a desirable trait to emulate.
   
   In physics the more active the atoms in a substance the hotter the substance. Atoms in boiling water are much more active than in ice. Therefore it is logical to equate increased activity with heat.
   
   So cuddle up with your "significant" other on a cold night, enjoy the increased heat, and conserve energy at the same time. Just be cool about it.

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6. 6. Diesel67 02:53 PM 7/19/12

   Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Perhaps all this stems from our ancestors earning their living by running down big game on the hot African savanna, and thereby evolving physiological mechanisms to handle heat, while having next to nothing to handle cold.

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7. 7. ryanharford 06:48 PM 7/20/12

   the simple look at a infrared camera that's wavelenght's are just out of human range , yet vibration's felt over the surface of the skin 1mm - 10mm across will under quiet observation synchronize with the movement's of the more physically active people in the group , heat is one of the force's that the electromagnetic spectrum transfer's into sound movement , the three major sense's of feeling , hearing and vision through synesthic techniques are more than enough to have an awareness of heat at distance

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