![]() ![]() And participants who held a hot therapeutic pad were more likely later to choose a reward that they could share with a friend than those who held a cold therapeutic pad (607). In the Williams and Bargh study, research participants who briefly held a hot cup of coffee, were more likely to perceive others as having warmer personality traits than participants who briefly held an iced coffee. So we have these associations of comfort and safety and trust tied to warmth because our early caregivers provide these components of psychological warmth in addition to actual physical warmth (606). Harlow's work has been instrumental in the ways child care agencies approach and design care policies for children. The absence of this sort of comfort has been tied to severe developmental issues later in life. Harlow used these findings to establish the importance of comfort from contact, particularly in the early years of life. The monkeys chose the cloth mothers for comfort and only turned to the wire mothers when driven to do so by hunger. ![]() One was made of cloth and heated with a light bulb and the other was constructed from wire but provided food. The short of it is that researchers presented two surrogate "mothers" to infant macaques. (I also summarized the study following the video, so feel free to skip ahead.) If you're interested, there's also a video, but be warned, it might tug at your heart a bit-Harlow's experiments have been criticized as being cruel and unethical, however, the video does not contain any explicit physical violence against the macaques. If you don't know this study, it's actually an interesting read, and you can learn more here. As an example, Williams and Bargh cited Harry Harlow's classic study with macaques where infants demonstrated a preference for a cloth surrogate mother over a wire mother who provided food. Experiences of warmth may trigger other associations we have with this sensation, which links it to psychological warmth. The warm-cold divide may be rooted in our physical experiences with these sensations. Exposure to cold seemed to help us focus our attentions more selfishly. So, for example, we might be more likely to share or think ahead about and plan for reciprocal behaviors. Exposure to physical warmth seemed to trigger behaviors to encourage these perceptions about us. ![]() What is interpersonal warmth? It refers to a series of traits that we perceive in others as being favorable to us-for example, we might talk about how friendly, or helpful, or trustworthy someone might be, which helps us assess whether he is friend-material or someone who should be avoided. The study found that experiences of physical warmth activated concepts of interpersonal warmth. In 2008 researchers Lawrence Williams and John Bargh garnered some press for disbunking this saying. They're just regular folk whose body temperatures hover at the norm of 98.6 degrees F. That is, people with warm hands aren't reputed to have cold hearts. There is no counterpart as far as I can tell. It's a curious saying: "Cold hands, warm heart." It proposes that people whose hands are usually cold actually have kind and loving personalities. ![]()
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