Being ostracized or excluded, even briefly and by strangers, is painful and threatens fundamental needs. Recent work by Zhong and Leonardelli (2008) found that excluded individuals perceive the room as cooler and that they desire warmer drinks. A perspective that many rely on in embodiment is the theoretical idea that people use metaphorical associations to understand social exclusion (see Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010). We suggest that people feel colder because they are colder. The results strongly support the idea that more complex metaphorical understandings of social relations are scaffolded onto literal changes in bodily temperature: Being excluded in an online ball tossing game leads to lower finger temperatures (Study 1), while the negative affect typically experienced after such social exclusion is alleviated after holding a cup of warm tea (Study 2). The authors discuss further implications for the interaction between body and social relations specifically, and for basic and cognitive systems in general.
In the realm of social relations, people often use metaphors such as “she is cold and aloof” or “she is a warm person.” Temperature metaphors conveniently establish and explain what is meant, and often show a remarkable similarity in imagery across languages. In particular, people's “social temperature” is central to the perception of relationships. These ideas are reminiscent of Asch's (1946) early work, which proposed psychological warmth as being the central dimension in which people judge one another (see also Fiske, Cuddy, & Glicke, 2007). But what may be the underlying cause for the strong metaphorical connections between warmth and social relations? In later work, Asch (1958) advanced the theory that the metaphor of warmth may be related to the real, physical experience of warmth.
Metaphors based on physical warmth describing one's social relations have thus been suggested to combine elements of very concrete experiences and more abstract conceptions of how people think of others, learned early in life. In the present report, we will go beyond such metaphorical perspectives of warmth by suggesting that temperature changes constitute the “fabric” of social relations, hinging on specific, basic, and possibly biologically evolved simulators. We hypothesized and found that people literally decrease in skin temperature after social exclusion. In addition, we found that “fooling” the fingers, by briefly stimulating them with a cup of warm tea, eliminates the negative feelings typically experienced after social exclusion.
2. Metaphorical perspectives on warmth and social relations
The recent metaphor perspective in psychology, proposed by cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and antedated by Asch (1958), suggested that people experience concrete source domains (e.g., physical warmth) jointly with abstract target concepts (e.g., affection), and as a result “conflate” the mapping of physical warmth and affection (see also Johnson, 1997). Recent social psychological investigations seem to support this learning process: The experience of subtle manipulations of physical warmth (as compared to coldness) leads to the perception of another as more sociable (central to the person characteristic of “warm”) and to greater prosocial behavior of the participant (Williams & Bargh, 2008).
In addition, subtle manipulations of physical warmth (as compared to coldness) lead to cognitions that form the basis for communal relations: people in physically warmer conditions use more verbs (indicative of social closeness; Semin & Fiedler, 1988), are more focused on relationships in their environment, and construe themselves as having greater psychological overlap with the experimenter (IJzerman & Semin, 2009). In other words, due to learning that physical warmth and affection go hand-in-hand, people seem to develop mental representations that include both abstract conceptions of affectionate feelings and the sensorimotor experience of physical warmth, such that when they are in a warm environment, they will interact as if they are psychologically closer to others.
Yet, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) proposed unidirectionality to be central to such conceptual metaphors. Indeed, experiencing affection almost always includes physical warmth (but not vice versa), integrating the sensorimotor experience of physical warmth into the mental representation of affection, but characteristics of the mental representations of affection do not become an integral part of the mental representation of warmth (cf. Landau, Keefer, & Meier, 2011). Such a perspective was confirmed in a different domain by Casasanto and Boroditsky (2008), who showed the connection between time and space. Indeed, they find that people's experience of space affects their perception of time, but not vice versa.
However, in the domain of physical warmth and affection, the effect seems to be bi-directional: When people are socially excluded or primed (either physically or psychologically) with distance they perceive ambient temperature as lower (for our theoretical background, see also IJzerman & Koole, 2011; also IJzerman and Semin, 2010 and Zhong and Leonardelli, 2008). Previous work has suggested that conceptual metaphors may be learned linguistically ( Boroditsky, 2000), or experientially ( Casasanto, 2008), allowing for possibilities to map such effects bi-directionally through the integration of sensorimotor experiences into the abstract concept domain. In addition, recent reviews support the idea that many conceptual metaphors may be dynamic and flexible ( Santiago, Román, & Ouellet, 2011). However, do experiences related to social relations rest on conceptual metaphors, or, if not, what may then account for earlier findings linking physical warmth and affection?
