Warm Up to Someone New, Hold On to Something Hot

Holding hands doesn’t just make couples closer it also makes their relationship warmer from the inside out, says new research published today in the journal Science. Two researchers and their team set out to prove that by warming up your hands you’re also warming up your heart, consequently making yourself more approachable and brightening your personality. Co-authors Lawrence Williams, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John A. Bargh, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Yale University teamed up to test if physical warmth and emotional feedback really do affect each other.

By using undergraduates in their experiments, Williams and Bargh set up a questionnaire and had 41 students participate in answering questions about someone they had not met. When each student arrived they were met in the lobby and while getting into the elevator the tester asked he or she to either hold a hot cup of coffee or an iced coffee for the duration of the ride while the tester wrote information down on a clipboard. The students were unaware that holding the cup of coffee was part of the research. Once in the questionnaire room, the unknown person is then described to each of the students with words like, “skillful, practical, cautious, industrious, and intelligent” and then the students fill out their opinions about the unknown person’s personality.

The researchers gathered from the questionnaires that those students who were asked to hold the hot cup of coffee answered more favorably that the unknown person had a warmer personality than those who held the iced coffee.

Co-author Bargh says in a press release, "When we ask whether someone is a warm person or cold person, they both have a temperature of 98.6….These terms implicitly tap into the primitive experience of what it means to be warm and cold."

Another experiment involved 53 volunteers holding either a hot or cold therapeutic pad and asked to evaluate its quality as a product. After the evaluation, each participant was asked to choose a parting gift, a sweet for themselves or one to share with a friend. Of the half of the group that held the warm pad, 54 percent of them chose the treat to share and of the group that held the cold pad, only 25 percent chose the shared reward over one just for themselves.

"It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well," Bargh says. "Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer—more generous and trusting—as well."

The researchers were able to conclude from the findings that holding a hot cup of coffee even for less than 30 seconds can alter the way you see others. The testers noticed that the students who held the hot cup of coffee on the elevator were more sociable and easier to talk to while the iced coffee holders had less interaction with others and seemed harder to approach. Undoubtebly there’s a definite cause-effect connection between temperature and emotional reactions.

Lead author Williams says, "At a board meeting, for instance, being willing to reach out and touch another human being, to share their hand, those experiences do matter although we may not always be aware of them." The authors encourage greetings of handshakes, hearty hugs or high-fives as a way to connect with others on many levels. Next time you want a hand to hold consider warming yours up first, you never know the emotional response you will get. The study’s investigators connect the emotional response to a feeling of comfort that starts as an infant when being held and feeling warmth is inherently linked to necessities such as safety, food, and of course, love. Who knows, that next coffee date may just surprise you.