The student volunteers didn’t realize when the experiment started. They showed up at Yale University’s psychology building and met their contact near the elevators. She was holding some textbooks and a cup of coffee. The woman with the coffee was [part of the experiment]. She knew what she was supposed to do, but she didn’t know why. One by one, she took the students up to the fourth floor in an elevator. As they rode up, the woman asked students, “in a pretty innocuous way, if they wouldn’t mind holding her coffee cup while she wrote down some information,” Williams explained.

Half the students got to hold hot coffee; half got iced coffee. They held the cup for only a few seconds. But that short experience must have changed something in their brains. When they arrived at the fourth floor, they filled out questionnaires. They read a short description of a hypothetical person — Person A — and they had to evaluate this stranger’s personality.

Here’s where the coffee’s influence became apparent. “Participants who held the hot coffee cup rated this Person A as more generous, more social, happier, better natured” than participants who held the iced coffee cup, Williams said. Williams thinks it’s no coincidence that we use the same word — warmth — to describe both a physical and an emotional experience. Somewhere in the brain, those two sensations are linked, he says. And you can imagine why: Think of a baby held in its mother’s arms. The child is experiencing love, affection, comfort.

“But you also have, at the same time, an experience with a warm object, in that case a warm human being,” Williams said.

:: Full Article via A Real Live Conversation (Thanks Amy!!) ::

Now get off the internet and go give someone a hug.