
The Substitutability of Physical and Social Warmth in Daily Life (2013) - Hooke
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3406601/
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araes
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.

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ergothus
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.

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

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mojuba
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.

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truculation
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

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roflc0ptic
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.

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0xcde4c3db
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/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595273/)

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roflc0ptic
Neat! Thanks for the link.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s7-ULyEyA0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s7-ULyEyA0)

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loorinm
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!

~~~
ardit33
Don't leave. Take a long warm bath/shower and come back!

