Why A Good Friend Has the Same Effect As a Warm Fire

Original source: SimoleonSense.com .

Excerpt –Via David Berreby @ BigThink

A growing body of research suggests that physical and psychological perceptions share common pathways. Experiments have already shown, for example, that physically warming up a room causes people in it to feel their relationships are closer. The question Hans Ijzerman and his colleagues took up in this paper was: Would this effect work in reverse? Instead of warming up social perceptions by heating the room, could you make people feel the room was toasty just by putting a loved one nearby?

Answer: Yes. Their paper, recently published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, compared the temperature perceptions of people who stood within two feet of an intimate, compared to people who did not. On average, the people who stood close to a loved one guessed that the temperature in the lab was 2 degrees warmer than did those who weren’t experiencing that social and emotional connection. (Unfortunately, the work is behind an outrageously expensive paywall and the abstract is incomplete on ScienceDirect’s greedy website. So I’ve had to deduce some details from the abstract and Daily Mail article.)

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