Social Thermoregulation: A Meta-Analysis

One key motivating force for bonding across animals is their need to regulate body temperature, also called social thermoregulation. This phenomenon has been extensively documented in animals, but only recently its existence has been suggested in humans. Psychology, however, has been faced with conflicting findings and the social thermoregulation literature has been no exception. We conducted a meta-analysis of the social thermoregulation literature in humans with the goal of estimating bias-corrected effect sizes and examining the evidential value. We included studies in English on humans and coded studies based on three theoretical frameworks (Bargh, Lakoff, and IJzerman). We found that temperature can be “primed” and that support for “compensation” is mixed. Social thermoregulation’s effect sizes are symmetrical and bidirectional and there was insufficient data available to examine claims about moderation by attachment and latitude. Further, based on the available information in the literature, we cannot establish whether social thermoregulatory behaviors and cognitions are automatic. Results for different subfields (e.g., Emotion, Interpersonal) and methods (e.g., verbal/visual or tactile prime) were mixed. Results for the full dataset were moderated by proportion of women in the dataset, but no moderation by climate was detected. Standard error also decreased over the years, meaning that publication practices in this literature are slightly improving, but heterogeneity is substantial. Better measurements, more diverse samples, and Registered Reports will be necessary for a higher-quality social thermoregulation literature.

A Tutorial towards Theory Formalization in (Social) Embodiment

Embodied – or grounded - cognition frameworks assume that human thought is affected by inputs from the bodily modalities and the environment and emerged in response to amodal approaches. But the embodied cognition literature, generally speaking, lacks the formal theorizing that allows for specific predictions about relations between body and mind. This problem is amplified by the fact that psychological research has encountered replication problems, challenges to validity of measures and manipulations, and overgeneralization of obtained findings to populations and measures that were not tested. This chapter provides a tutorial on how the field can move towards formalized theories of embodied social cognition. We rely on research on social thermoregulation – the idea that social behaviors protect the body’s core temperature – as a template for this. The chapter addresses the important questions of how to separate noise from signal in embodiment research, how to create reliable and valid measures, and how to appropriately draw conclusions about the generalizability of obtained findings. We hope that following these recommendations will help theories in embodiment to become more formal, allowing for precise predictions about interactions between the body and human (social) cognition.

Validation of the ISP131001 Sensor for Mobile Peripheral Body Temperature Measurement

Previous studies have indicated that temperature regulation is related to social behavior (for an overview, see IJzerman et al., 2015; IJzerman & Hogerzeil, 2017). However, precise causal relationships between temperature and social behaviors are unclear. These links may be better understood by frequently measuring temperature in daily life and mapping those measurements onto social behaviors. The primary purpose of the present study was to enable such studies by validating a new wireless temperature sensor, the Insight SiP ISP131001, for human peripheral temperature measurement in daily life. In our exploratory dataset, we found moderately high correlations between two ISP131001 sensors and a comparison sensor (r = .81 for the average of our two ISP sensors). These correlations [replicated/did not replicate] in our confirmatory dataset (r = .xx for the average of our two ISP sensors). A secondary purpose of this report is the inclusion of a standard set of relevant measures for social thermoregulation research. We propose that this standard protocol of measures be included in future social thermoregulation studies in order to facilitate and encourage data re-use and aggregation across studies.

Stage 1 RR: Social Thermoregulation in Humans: Co-Regulation of Body Temperature through Facial Expressions?

We propose the first Registered Report examining social co-thermoregulation in humans, a widely studied phenomenon in ecology whereby animals help regulate body heat through conspecifics (for example, by huddling). Participants’ peripheral body temperature will be measured continuously while they view photos of their romantic partner, or strangers, making sad, neutral, angry, and happy facial expressions. If the proposed social thermoregulatory process operates as a function of partner emotional state, we predict that participants’ peripheral body temperature will increase in response to a sad partner and that these temperature responses will be strongest for high-quality (communal) relationships. For responses to angry and happy faces, we do not yet have strong priors and will analyze these with exploratory methods. We will analyze these data with linear mixed models in the lme4 R package. The study will have 95% power to detect the primary effects of interest and use a precise measure of peripheral body temperature. Results supporting such a temperature response would provide robust evidence for a social role in temperature regulation; a precisely estimated null effect would pose a strong challenge to our current understanding of social thermoregulation in humans and/or the paradigms used for studying it.