The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life (2013)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

82 pointsHooke16 comments

Interesting read, particularly being someone who takes lots of baths when alone. The difference between even two similar activities: shower (dance hot/cold) and bath (ahh) is profound.

Lots of subtleties though too: primarily, perception.

Ex1: My mother is a person who always hugs on meeting. Early life, good. Lots of physical affection. Later life, mixed. As [yes, hug] is at best normal, or duty, while [no hug] only produces cold. Normal is set high so all is down. Yet friends with families that shun physical affection would probably report mother as "very warm."

Ex2: Converse, had friend I hadn't seen in years basically insist on hug "none of that handshake shit." Rest of visit was decidedly warm. (Helped he kept house at 80+ ... 'or did he?')

Other is subconscious for examples like "think or say warm.". Like the Buddha example of 'monkey with a red hat'. " Have it clearly pictured? Now try not think of the monkey."

Having been freezing to death many times (last was cave in Himalayas), thinking warm often produces reverse effect. I want be warm, I'm thinking "warm," but subconscious focus is "sooo cold. !cold."

Be interesting to see if geographic effects have large play on ideas like family size or number of kids. "Want to stay married? Move to the South.". Could be iterative too. Trend is yes, feedback develops in resistance, but social institutions have also now formed that reinforce.

Perception is wild.

Key elements from the abstract, paraphrased and summarized:

* interpersonal warmth is important to human

* Other recent research says physical warmth/coldness can inspire the feelings, and vice versa

* This paper says people tend to subconsciously self-regulate their feelings of social warmth by applying physical warmth.

Interesting research. I wonder if there is an evolutionary link between the need for shared bodily heat for survival and these emotional manifestations.

Sounds like an evolutionary explanation, or part of it anyway. We produce and radiate heat that is mostly wasted, so shared bodily heat like you said does make sense from the point of view of physics. At the same time letting someone close enough to be able to mutually benefit from heat (and get cozy) is possible when there's mutual affection.

We don't merely wish to experience warmth in our social interactions we desire to get cozy. Having recently invested in dehumidifiers I can state that, roughly speaking,

coziness = 0.8 * warmth + 0.2 * dryness

Unconscious? Eh. The evidence looks weak.

Not sure someone ever unconsciously gets in the shower, and all else being equal, it’s more parsimonious to say the person wants to shower to feel better, and isn’t inventing a rationalization (Wow, I’m just really dirty today. I should shower again. This has nothing to do with the crushing loneliness I’m feeling) for self soothing behavior. Their evidence that it’s unconscious was “people don’t assume (in a statistically significant way) other people are sad because they shower”, which could be easily read to mean “people aren’t very good at theory of mind.”

Criticism aside, though, it’s interesting to think that the cognitive mechanisms might overlap. There seems to be increasing evidence that our abstract reasoning is built from the cognitive building blocks acquired by exploring the physical world as infants.

I think that for me there is never a rationalisation, I can't think of a time that I've showered again because I'm down. However I do know that (before my shower drains got screwy, sigh) when I was having a rough weekend I might spend 30+ minutes in the shower instead of 10. Because it feels nice.

Do I need anything more than that?

There's preliminary evidence suggesting that there's a persistent somatosensory difference, i.e. the "unconscious" part is that the person doesn't directly sense the underlying physiological shift that motivates the behavior. See [1] (which cites this article).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/

Neat! Thanks for the link.

> There seems to be increasing evidence that our abstract reasoning is built from the cognitive building blocks acquired by exploring the physical world as infants.

If you’re not already aware, this line of research generally falls under the term ‘embodiment’. George Lakoff has written a few books on the matter.

This reminds me of Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how we handle metaphor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s7-ULyEyA0

This is pretty much why, even though HN has better discussion quality than most websites, I’m leaving.

I guess this isn’t super related to the article but from my experiences here on HN, even if conversations are not outright trolling or insulting, the warmth just isn’t there.

The style of argument isn’t horrible but it’s also not as constructive as it would be if it were amongst in-person friends who knew and cared about each other.

It’s been great. All the best. Bye!

Don't leave. Take a long warm bath/shower and come back!

Your own comment history is pretty negative and not particularly warm.

I'll agree with the other post here...where is the warmth in your own comment history?

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