by Sian Beilock
Warm Feelings or a Cold Shoulder?
The connection between temperature and social comfort is apparent from birth. Our caretakers provide love and support and hold us close. Through these intimate moments, we learn to link warm temperature with being in close proximity to others. This association also occurs later in life. When lots of people are in a room together, be it on an airplane, in a classroom, or in an elevator, ambient temperature increases due to the emission of body heat. Warm weather in general is also associated with more close interactions, although not always in a positive way. Crimes that involve interpersonal contact, such as assault, occur more often during hot spells.
Our language illustrates the connection between physical and social warmth. For instance, we describe our friends as “warm and sweet” and our foes as “cold-hearted and hard.” A relationship may be “warm and loving,” or you may have been given “the cold shoulder.” These metaphors arise because we understand our emotions by analogy to the physical world. We even activate some of the same brain states when we think about social warmth and when we physically experience warm temperatures. One important consequence of this connection is that our physical sensation of warmth or coldness has the power to influence our judgments and behaviors—and we often don’t realize that this is happening.
Consider an experiment in which neuroscientists invited volunteers to have their brain scanned while they underwent a series of activities.3 First they read loving messages from close friends and family, such as “Whenever I am completely lost, you are the person I turn to” and “I love you more than anything in the world.” In the second part of the experiment, the volunteers sometimes held a warm pack and other times squeezed a rubber ball. Volunteers reported feeling warmer when they read the loving messages than when they read neutral ones like “You have curly hair” and “I have known you for ten years.” They also reported feeling more socially connected when they held the warm pack than when they squeezed the ball.
There is growing evidence that humans are born with the capability to make the association between warmth and well-being, trust and safety; in other words, this capability may be hardwired in our brain. The bit of brain tissue in question, the insula, is folded deep inside the brain. It is thought to be involved in the processing of both physical temperature and social temperature, namely, trust, empathy, social exclusion, and embarrassment.
Insula is the Latin word for “island.” When you peel off the outer layer of the brain, you find a portion of the cortex that does look somewhat like an island with hilly terrain. The insula registers both physical and psychological experiences, helping to make the crossover between temperature and social connectedness seamless. The insula functions as a communication hub, a relay between the physical and the mental and back again.
This association of physical and social warmth also extends to our actions. Researchers have conducted experiments asking people to rate hot and cold therapeutic pads under the guise of participating in a study on product evaluation. They’re asked how good the pads are at generating warmth or coldness and whether they would recommend the product to their friends or family. Then they’re asked to play an online investment game in which they have to decide how much money to invest in a trustee, with the hope of receiving considerable gains on their investment. After touching a cold pack, players are less trusting of their anonymous partner, investing less money, than when they touch a hot pack. Researchers found that the insula was more active when people experienced cold temperatures and when they made trust decisions after experiencing cold, suggesting overlap in the brain areas used to gauge temperature and levy decisions about how much to trust someone.4 Having a cold physical experience makes us less likely to act in trusting ways.
These findings certainly make you wonder about how temperature might affect all types of decisions. In the courtroom, for example, are judges more likely to be lenient in their decisions if the room is warm? Is the stereotype of the warm, friendly Italian compared to the cold Swede due, in part, to the average ambient temperature in which these groups live?
The makeup of our brain tells us that the link between physical and social warmth shouldn’t operate in just one direction. If our neural temperature gauge works double-time to understand social interactions, then not only should physical warmth beget social comfort, but the opposite should also hold true. In one experiment, when people were asked to remember being rejected by a former boyfriend or girlfriend, they reported that the room felt colder than when they remembered a socially inclusive experience. When we feel rejected or isolated, we also tend to be more interested in warm food (a bowl of hot soup) and hot drinks (a nice cup of tea).5
Our quest for physical warmth when we feel socially spurned might help explain an interesting experience my husband and I had with our daughter. As any parent knows, the first time you leave your child overnight with another caregiver makes you extremely anxious. The possibility of a sound night’s sleep and the chance to linger in the shower in peace makes the separation a little easier for the parents, but the entire ordeal is difficult, especially if your kid can speak and is quite vocal about the fact that she doesn’t want you to leave her.
The first time my husband and I left our daughter, Sarah, was when she was nearly two years old. We had each been on several business trips for nights out of the house, but never both at the same time. After nearly two years of traveling separately, we figured it was time to get away together. The plan was to leave Sarah with her grandmother, “Munga,” as Sarah called her, and get away to the woods for a long weekend alone.
My husband and I found a lovely little bed-and-breakfast near the Point Reyes National Seashore, an out-of-the-way place with limited cell phone reception and a landline only for emergencies. We slept, ate, hiked, and slept some more and returned from the technological void rested, relaxed, and eager to hear how things had gone.
Not surprisingly, my mother reported that there had been tears when we left but they had stopped pretty soon after our car pulled out of the driveway. Once Sarah had come to terms with the fact that we had really left, however, she didn’t want to watch a movie or read books or play with the new train set my mother had bought her. She wanted to wear her comfy, fuzzy, and warm pj’s. And she didn’t want to take them off. Her grandmother thought it was a bit odd but was happy to oblige.
At the time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of my daughter’s newfound obsession with her pj’s. And when it didn’t last (once my husband and I were back, she wasn’t all that excited about them anymore), I didn’t give it a second thought. Until, that is, a few months after our trip, when I came across Harry Harlow’s classic psychological research connecting physical warmth with feelings of love and closeness. I realized then that there might be a connection between Sarah’s desire to stay in her pj’s and her need to feel safe, warm, and taken care of.6 Harlow wasn’t dressing his monkeys in comfy pj’s, but what was happening wasn’t so far off. Physical warming may make social isolation feel less severe.7
Loneliness really seems like a social coldness. This surely sheds light on the self-help books Chicken Soup for the Soul. For close to twenty years, this series has captured the hearts of millions of readers around the world by telling real-life stories of success and love. People know to turn to these books to find inspiration after breakups or in times of social isolation. What many people likely don’t know, however, is that having some warm chicken soup while reading these books may also not be a bad idea. Actually, there are a whole host of self-medicating activities that may be advisable when we feel lonely—ones that can be easily incorporated into our lives when we’re aware of the mind-body connection. Vacationing in warm locales, putting on a cozy sweater, or even having a hot toddy may contribute to feelings of being loved and included. The opposite seems to be true as well. In cold winter months, you are more likely to opt to watch a feel-good romance.8 We seek emotional warmth in the form of romantic chick flicks. Our body and the
surrounding temperature have a profound effect on our mind.
This interchangeability of feelings and temperature also helps us understand psychological disorders like seasonal affective disorder, otherwise known by the fitting acronym SAD. People with SAD experience symptoms of depression during the winter months, when it’s dark outside even during the day. This disorder is different from ordinary depression because folks with SAD are otherwise healthy, especially in the sunnier summer months. Research on SAD has predominantly focused on the connection between reduced daylight and depression, but colder temperatures might contribute to an increase in patients’ sadness and loneliness. Cold temperatures during the winter may also magnify their feelings of depression. Though UV sun lamps are often prescribed for people who suffer from winter depression, they may also benefit from the power of warmth.
Simply put, being warm can make people feel better and more connected. Perhaps it’s no accident that some of the most important political meetings in history have taken place in warm, intimate environments. Camp David, for example, is tucked in the wooded hills of Maryland. U.S. presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt have brought world leaders together at Camp David to navigate treacherous political issues and broker important deals. Jimmy Carter oversaw the Camp David Accords, a landmark peace settlement in the Middle East in 1978 between President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel. President Obama held the 2012 G8 Summit at Camp David. Sitting by a warm fire likely helps foster feelings of inclusion, of being of one mind. The end result is a path to mutual understanding and decision making. Warmth makes people feel socially close and connected.
Rejection Hurts, Physically
For decades, neuroscientists have been keenly aware that a specific brain circuit is involved in registering physical pain. Whether you get pricked with a needle, burn your hand, or sprain your ankle, many of the same neural circuits come alive to process the pain. This “pain matrix” includes brain areas such as the insula, the cingulate cortex, and the somatosensory cortex, which registers information coming in from our senses. Scientists have discovered that, just as in the connection between coldness and loneliness, some of the same bits of neural tissue involved in recognizing our physical pain also give rise to painful feelings and emotions.9 We understand psychologically adverse situations, whether it’s “hurt feelings” or a “broken heart,” as physically adverse ones.
Using the same brain systems to register social and physical pain makes evolutionary and economical sense. Rather than developing an entirely new brain area to register social pain, we evolved so that our more ancient pain systems perform the same functions. Perhaps the Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky said it best: “Evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor.”10 We deal with social pain the best way we know how: we feel it physically.
It’s easy to see how our physical pain system could have evolved to register social pain. Many primates, particularly humans, have a long infancy, which means that maintaining social connections at an early age (for food, shelter, and protection) is critical for survival. If being separated from a caretaker is a threat to survival, feeling emotionally hurt by this separation could offer an adaptive edge, helping to keep caretakers close at hand. Perhaps those infants who were best at using their pain system as a social alarm when they felt distant from their caretakers were the ones who thrived, resulting in the evolution of a system that serves two purposes.11
Two UCLA neuroscientists, Naomi Eisenberger and Matt Lieberman, support the view that our physical and social pain systems are one and the same. It all started in 2003, when they did an experiment in which they asked volunteers to take part in a computer game known as Cyberball.12 Cyberball appears to be a virtual game of catch with two other players whose computer is networked to the volunteer’s. The volunteer can’t see the other people playing; he’s told something about them—their names, ages, and a little information about their interests and backgrounds. For a while, the three play catch, but at some point the other two players stop including the volunteer, tossing the ball back and forth only with each other. He can only sit and watch as he’s excluded, shunned from the game.
In reality, there aren’t any other players; the game is controlled by a computer. But the volunteers don’t know this. While the volunteer played and then was excluded from the game, the scientists peered inside his brain and discovered that part of the neural pain matrix—specifically the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)—came alive. Along with its role in processing negative emotions, the ACC acts as a neural alarm system, detecting when an action, response, or event is in conflict with a larger goal. For example, the ACC might become active in a husband when his wife asks if the outfit she is wearing makes her look fat, and, without thinking, he responds, “Yes.” When we make a social error like this, the ACC generates a unique electrical signal that floods the rest of the brain with information that there is a problem. Because of this, the ACC is often talked about as our “oh, shit” sensor, giving rise to the realization that something is wrong. It’s not surprising, then, that the ACC becomes active when we are rejected or in an adverse social situation. Physical pain, the most basic signal that there is a problem, also activates this brain area.
Because the brain doesn’t always make a clear distinction between physical and social pain, some of the ways we go about alleviating physical pain can help lessen social pain too. When people take acetaminophen (Tylenol) over the course of several weeks, they report less daily social pain, and their brain’s pain matrix is also less reactive to social rejection. A daily dose of Tylenol diminishes the hurt feelings that often accompany being socially rejected likely because it reduces the sensitivity of our neural circuits involved in pain.13
Social exclusion is a normal part of life. We have all, at one time or another, felt disliked at work, spurned by a partner, or snubbed by friends. Even though it’s unpleasant, social rejection seems pretty different from a physical injury. Yet these experiences share a common biological substrate in the brain. Evolution’s solution to our need for caretaking seems to be instilling in us a need for social connection and a sense of distress when those connections are severed. It really does hurt to lose someone we love.
Understanding the link between the mental and the physical also arms us with clues for how best to interact with others—especially when we need them to perform well. At work, for instance, calling out individual workers for failed projects or a lack of collegiality may trigger a cascade of neural responses in a colleague’s pain matrix, responses that result in less productivity and worse future performance rather than better. When our social alarm systems are triggered, we have less brainpower to think productively about the task at hand. Instead, fostering relationships that help teams of people feel connected might do more to boost work performance. When we feel connected, we work better. Team-building exercises that encourage groups of people who work together to feel more physically trusting may be just what people need in order to be mentally connected too. In the classic trust exercise, you stand with your back to a group of people and fall backward into what you hope will be their comforting and supportive arms. Our mental and physical worlds cannot be carved up into neat, separate boxes. Once you understand this, you may be more likely to guard against emotional distress with the same care you take to ensure that no physical harm befalls you or those around you.14
Distance Matters
In a follow-up experiment in Henry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory, Jane and the other baby rhesus monkeys were moved from their cages to a new room littered with unfamiliar toys that produced odd sounds and jolting movements. A mechanical teddy bear that played a drum was the most unsettling. Scared to be in a new place, Jane sought out her warm and soft cloth surrogate mother. Like any young child who finds herself in a strange and unfamiliar situation, Jane made a beeline for her mom, to which she clung until she felt brave enough to explore her surroundings, going back every so often
to make sure her mother was right where she left her. Some of the other monkeys had only their cold, wire surrogate mothers to keep them company. These monkeys behaved very differently, traveling randomly around the room, almost as if they were looking for their real mother. Though the wire mother had milk, the young monkeys didn’t cling to her.
Not only is warmth an inherent part of social contact with a caregiver, but being close matters too. There is value in infants staying within arm’s reach of a parent so they can be protected from predators or foes. Physical closeness equals connection and safety. What’s striking is that the baby monkeys in Harlow’s lab didn’t seem to feel there was any value in staying close to their wire mother, even though she had food. Could this be because an emotional distance is largely interchangeable with physical distance? If the baby monkeys didn’t feel socially connected to their wire mother, they may not have felt the need to be physically close to her either.
The most famous demonstration of the strong tie between physical and emotional distance comes from a set of studies conducted by the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Sparked by an interest in how people could condone atrocities such as the Holocaust, Milgram set out to see just how far volunteers would go to follow the instructions of an authority figure. What he found was that even when obeying authority meant doing something that went against most people’s conscience, such as giving a complete stranger an electric shock, most volunteers did as they were told. Milgram also found that how physically far away two people were from each other made a big difference in terms of the likelihood of administering shocks. A physical closeness seems to beget a psychological connection.
