Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Uh, maybe it's a little more ...

... complicated: Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally.

You say a person is warm and likable, as opposed to cold and standoffish? In one recent study at Yale, researchers divided 41 college students into two groups and casually asked the members of Group A to hold a cup of hot coffee, those in Group B to hold iced coffee. The students were then ushered into a testing room and asked to evaluate the personality of an imaginary individual based on a packet of information.
Students who had recently been cradling the warm beverage were far likelier to judge the fictitious character as warm and friendly than were those who had held the iced coffee.


This actually suggests that it is the body that is influencing the thought, not that the thought is affecting the body.


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