This week (okay, last week, but shhh), we’re talking about interpersonal relations and social psych in our daily lives, and I have news for you.

Science and psychology alike have proven that on a subconscious level, people who meet over coffee will like one another more than those who meet over beer, wine, or your alcohol of choice.

There are actually an astronomically-high number of reasons this is true, including the energizing buzz of quiet productivity surrounding you in a coffeehouse and the potential dissonance induced by the social stigma surrounding going out for drinks, but today we’re looking at one very specific reason.

Let’s back up a little.

Think of the last time you took a shower, especially first thing in the morning. How did it make you feel? Odds are that you, like the vast majority of your peers, find that a morning shower not only wakes you up, but it also improves your mood and outlook. You step out of the shower feeling refreshed, both physically and emotionally. But is that just your biased perception, or is there an actual psychological and scientific basis behind it?

As it turns out, it’s actually legitimate.

Specifically, it’s the hot water itself that does the trick, sparking positivity and ‘warm fuzzy feelings’ inside of you. The cooler the water, the less effect it seems to have. Research also points to the fact that this association is learned, not innate.

But why do we learn this? How does it develop?

It starts in early development.

Research suggests that frequently experiencing affection and physical warmth at the same time in infancy develops a subconscious association between the two concepts  (Steinmetsz & Mussweiler, 2011). Affection is associated with feeling physical warmth, and feeling physical warmth is associated with affection.

The scientific basis for this theory stems from Harlow’s 1958 studies of infant monkeys raised by themselves. In that experiment, they were divided into two categories and each category got one of two kinds of “mother”: Half of the monkeys got a terrycloth mother, warmed by a 100-watt lightbulb, and half of the monkeys got a cold wire mother.

The monkeys with the warm terrycloth mother grew up almost entirely devoid of social deficits, while the monkeys with the cold wire mother grew up to be varying degrees of socially dysfunctional.

As a follow-up study, some new monkey infants were offered both mothers at once, and the cold wire mother was fitted with a feeding bottle. While the monkeys strayed to the cold wire mother to feed, the rest of the time was spent almost exclusively within arm’s reach of the terrycloth mother. It was clearly the mother they associated with social warmth and affection.

On top of that, it’s been discovered that young children who are securely attached to their parent(s) show more generosity toward others in physically warm situations than in physically cold ones,while children with less secure attachments show no change in generosity between the two temperatures (Ijzerman, Karremans, Thomsen & Schubert). This not only demonstrates a strong early-childhood correlation between physical temperature and social warmth, but it also demonstrates a correlation between strong parental attachment (and thus, one could assume, a socially-warm parent-child relationship) and physical warmth being an active stimulus for socially-warm behaviors.

The article Cold-Blooded Loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperatures poses what I’d consider an extremely viable explanation for the development of this association:

To close, we would like to note that the body’s architecture is likely to have developed in order to be able to adapt and bond quickly, without conscious effort. We suggest that the understanding of abstract concepts like affection through concrete experiences such as physical warmth is often derived from specific affordances with which people have become equipped. People mark social relations through actual changes in bodily temperatures, possibly offering evolutionary advantages in early life stages. (Ijzerman, Karremans, Thomsen & Schubert)

That is to say, babies and kids in their early years are much too young to properly understand less-than-concrete concepts of affection, and instead latch onto physical warmth as something they can grasp. This gives them a leg-up, because rather than being forced to wait until they’ve advanced to the point where affection is no longer too abstract, they can instead use changes in body temperature as a sort of ‘cheat sheet’ to understanding social relationships earlier on.

 

This carries over into adulthood.

Buckle up, because we have a handful of studies we’re taking a peek at in this section.

The first study comes from the article, The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life, by Bargh and Shalev at Yale University. While they did a handful of studies, I’ll be focusing primarily on Studies 1a and 1b.

Studies 1a and 1b were meant to test the hypothesis that people inadvertently or subconsciously compensate for a lack of perceived social warmth in their lives by increasing their voluntary exposure to physical warmth. Even more specific, they predicted that the trait ‘loneliness’ would strongly correlate with bathing habits (frequency, duration, and temperature of baths/showers).

As hypothesized, they found a strong positive correlation between a person’s loneliness and their bathing habits in both frequency and duration, as well as a lesser correlation with temperature. The degree of loneliness accounted for a whopping 23% difference in the participants’ bathing habits with regards to frequency, and the lonelier they were, the longer and hotter their bath/shower tended to be. Study 1b found the same correlation, but with only a 14% change. They attributed this to the fact that older participant group largely had stronger bathing habits and routines set into place than your average college student (subject pool for 1a).

This study, in summary, stated that many people experiencing extreme loneliness have inadvertently learned to temporarily reduce or even eliminate the loneliness feelings with frequent long hot showers.

 

Oh, you thought I was done? Get ready for two more studies.

The authors of the article, Cold-blooded loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperatures, by Ijzerman, Gallucci, Pouow, Weiβgerber, Doesum, and Williams conducted a psychophysiological experiment on another facet of this topic. The goal of the study was to support the hypothesis that people experience physical temperature changes to process “close and affiliative relations”.

In their first study, their hypothesis predicted that social exclusion would cause the participants’ temperature to drop. Their second study set to prove that if they stimulated the participant with physical warmth, the negative affect caused by perceived social exclusion would disappear and the participant would again feel connected.

The first set of results supported the hypothesis! Even once all variables were accounted for, participants thus had physically colder skin after they experienced perceived social rejection.

The second study had two variables: included .vs. excluded, and holding a hot drink .vs. holding a cold drink. This supported the hypothesis just like the first one: The greatest level of negative affect were the excluded participants who held a cold drink. Meanwhile, the exclusion group who held a hot drink showed no significant difference in affect from the inclusion groups.

This supports the hypothesis that a warm cup (that is to say, physical warmth) can actually alleviate the effects of social exclusion.

 

What does all of this boil down to?

Firstly, my new favorite dating tip: Ask them to coffee, not to a bar (or even out to fro-yo). Buy them a hot beverage, and keep your own hot beverage clasped between your hands to raise the odds that your date might do the same – and if each of you has a warm cup in your hand, you’ll subconsciously feel more connected and even affectionate, and there’s a higher chance that the both of you will go home happy.

In a more general sense: If your social life’s a mess, self-medicate with a nice hot shower. Heck, depending on how long it’s been since you’ve taken one, that might solve your social issues altogether. (Hard to go wrong with good hygiene.)

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES:

Bargh, J., & Shalev, I. (2012). The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life. Emotion. Retrieved September 26, 2014.

Ijzerman, H., Gallucci, M., Pouw, W., Weiβgerber, S., Doesum, N., & Williams, K. (n.d.). Cold-blooded loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperatures. Acta Psychologica, 283-288. Retrieved October 20, 2014.

Kraus, M., Huang, C., & Keltner, D. (n.d.). Tactile Communication, Cooperation, And Performance: An Ethological Study Of The NBA. Emotion, 745-749.

IJzerman, H., Karremans, J.C., Thomsen, L., Schubert, T.W., in press. Caring for sharing: How attachment styles modulate cues of physical warmth. Social Psychology.

Rimm-Kaufman, S., & Kagan, J. (n.d.). The psychological significance of changes in skin temperature. Motivation and Emotion, 63-78. Retrieved October 22, 2014.

Shalev, I., & Bargh, J. (2011). Use of Priming-Based Interventions to Facilitate Psychological Health: Commentary on Kazdin and Blase (2011). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 488-492.

Steinmetz, J., & Mussweiler, T. (n.d.). Breaking the ice: How physical warmth shapes social comparison consequences. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1025-1028. Retrieved October 25, 2014.

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