http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html

Quote:The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”

Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded.

You say you’re looking forward to the future? Here, Ma, watch me pitch forward!

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.

It's interesting how many other things that might affect. Sitting with a warm mug of cocoa is supposed to be a happy thing anyhow, but maybe the warmth itself had more effect on the situation than just warming you physically.

For some reason I'm reminded of the synesthesia plot line in Railgun...

Regardless, this isn't necessarily a new find, if anything I would say its simply further proof of something we've known for awhile. Humans aren't well equipped to judge their environmental in a disconnected state (I forget the way my professor explained it).

Example: If you want to improve your standing with a single woman/guy, the best time to try it is after they have been working out. The reason is that many will often mistake their bodies reactions (fast heart rate, sweating, hot/blushing, etc.) to you as infatuation. They proved this by having two groups of people talk with someone of the opposite sex. One group got a drink that was laced with a stimulant (or something of the like) and the other just got a normal beverage. The stimulant raised the heart rate and caused sweating/blushing. The drugged group rated higher ratings of attraction to the other. Case in point, how our body is affects the way we judge a situation.

vix86 Wrote:For some reason I'm reminded of the synesthesia plot line in Railgun...

Regardless, this isn't necessarily a new find, if anything I would say its simply further proof of something we've known for awhile. Humans aren't well equipped to judge their environmental in a disconnected state (I forget the way my professor explained it).

Example: If you want to improve your standing with a single woman/guy, the best time to try it is after they have been working out. The reason is that many will often mistake their bodies reactions (fast heart rate, sweating, hot/blushing, etc.) to you as infatuation. They proved this by having two groups of people talk with someone of the opposite sex. One group got a drink that was laced with a stimulant (or something of the like) and the other just got a normal beverage. The stimulant raised the heart rate and caused sweating/blushing. The drugged group rated higher ratings of attraction to the other. Case in point, how our body is affects the way we judge a situation.

I don't know about that particular area, sounds a bit NLP to me, and a cursory check tells me that bodily arousal doesn't trigger emotional arousal (here), even though there's the whole Ekman/facial feedback thing (although I always caution against folks reading too much into Ekman's research, re: the show Lie To Me)... but here's another recent related article: Can Blocking a Frown Keep Bad Feelings at Bay?

Quote:"There is a long-standing idea in psychology, called the facial feedback hypothesis," says Havas. "Essentially, it says, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. It's an old song, but it's right. Actually, this study suggests the opposite: When you're not frowning, the world seems less angry and less sad."

The Havas study broke new ground by linking the expression of emotion to the ability to understand language, says Havas's advisor, UW-Madison professor emeritus of psychology Arthur Glenberg. "Normally, the brain would be sending signals to the periphery to frown, and the extent of the frown would be sent back to the brain. But here, that loop is disrupted, and the intensity of the emotion, and of our ability to understand it when embodied in language, is disrupted."

Just from your example I'd say that, you know, being on drugs helped them feel more attracted. ;p

Edit: Odd, I've actually studied this 'misattribution of arousal' theory before but didn't recall until I did more research (thinking of that study about men who watched gay films and those who showed signs of the most arousal were the most homophobic in their vocal reactions). Still, it seems very 'iffy' to me... here's one summary from [url=http://books.google.com/books?id=6_oMTjYR25gC&pg=PA82&lr=&cd=14#v=onepage&q="the evidence for the role of"&f=false]2007[/url]... 'Iffy' isn't the word I'm looking for. Broader and more conditional, more indirect is what I was going for. Here's more on excitation transfer.

Personally I try to keep my focus, emotion-wise, on particular areas--I kind of view those older ('60s-'80s seems to the the bulk of the research), highly contextual studies to be built on a less steady framework than current views such as affective neuroscience (Panksepp).

nest0r Wrote:Just from your example I'd say that, you know, being on drugs helped them feel more attracted. ;p

Heh, well in a roundabout way, it was the drugs making them feel attracted. And ya, the idea I was trying to get at sounds a lot like the Facial Feedback theory sort of, cept it applies more to the entire body. (People's bodies respond a certain way and people try to interpret why they are responding this way.)

I would have to agree on the 60-80's view on arousal/emotion based studies as well. Though I think the point is to view them more like so many people view Freud these days. People built off the ideas and used them to ask further questions, which is where Neuroscience picked up.

vix86 Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Just from your example I'd say that, you know, being on drugs helped them feel more attracted. ;p

Heh, well in a roundabout way, it was the drugs making them feel attracted. And ya, the idea I was trying to get at sounds a lot like the Facial Feedback theory sort of, cept it applies more to the entire body. (People's bodies respond a certain way and people try to interpret why they are responding this way.)

I would have to agree on the 60-80's view on arousal/emotion based studies as well. Though I think the point is to view them more like so many people view Freud these days. People built off the ideas and used them to ask further questions, which is where Neuroscience picked up.

Manipulating biofeedback is a very interesting area (re: controlling facial muscles to influence emotions)... such as the mirror box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box or my favourite, the augmented reality mirror box.