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Recent studies suggest that metaphors are more than just fancy literary devices and that there is a psychological basis for linking cold with feelings of social isolation. Psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management wanted to test the idea that social isolation might generate a physical feeling of coldness. In their first experiment, they divided a group of volunteers into two groups. One group recalled a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded-rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to tap into their feelings of isolation and loneliness. The other group recalled an experience in which they had been accepted into a group. Afterwards, volunteers were asked to estimate the temperature in the room. Those who recalled memories of being ostracized experienced the ambient temperature of the room as colder. In a second experiment, researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out. Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the "unpopular" volunteers who had been ostracized during the computer game were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or hot coffee. Their preference for warm food and drinks presumably resulted from physically feeling cold as a result of being excluded. "It's striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded," Leonardelli said. "Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation."

"Participants in the warm room used more concrete, physical language to describe the film and reported feeling socially closer to the experimenter than did the participants in a cold room... participants in a warm room were more likely to recognise the "relational similarity" between objects." Related to temperature metaphors, e.g. "Holding warm feelings toward someone" and "giving someone the cold shoulder". Actual study at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19732385

Have you ever experienced mind-numbing cold? Or have you ever felt like it was so hot you could barely think? Believe it or not, these expressions are more than just idioms. Research shows that shifts in core body temperature caused by extreme heat or cold can have significant effects not only on mood but also on cognition.

Recently someone mentioned on If you believe, as I do, that stuttering is fundamentally the result of stress/tension-sensitive muscles of the vocal folds (also known as vocal cords) that "lock" when over-tensed, it makes sense that cold weather could make stuttering worse.

The English language is not sick. It is not even afflicted with a head cold, much less languishing on its deathbed. Nor is it under attack: there are no nefarious forces conspiring to change it from an eloquent tongue to a series of grunt and emoticons.

Babbling is the term for the second stage of speech development after the newborn stage of crying. Anyone who has been around a newborn knows they cry when they're hungry, cold, sick or in need of changing. Some cry because they just want to be held.

"You had seen a lot of chatty talk between the Clintons and the Obamas, the Carters. But when Donald Trump sat down, the greeting that he was given by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama was about as cool as it could have been." Trump's encounter with living members of the 'Presidents Club' serves as a fascinating study for those in the media and academia. From a social psychology standpoint, the cold and ignorant reactions from the former presidents and first ladies towards the current president specifically acknowledged an 'uninvited' member was intruding upon the ingroup.

Richard Stephens and his colleagues from Keele University found that swearing makes people more able to tolerate pain. His study involved participants sticking their hands in ice cold water and seeing how long they could hold their hand inside. They found the participants who swore, could hold their hands in twice as long than the ones who said neutral words.

This article talks about hygge and what it means to Danes. It talks about how hygge has shaped policies in Denmark, notably its anti-refugee stance. The article talks about the explosion of popularity of the word.

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high. None of those things are true. But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the "illusory truth effect," a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias. "Repetition makes things seem more plausible," says Lynn Hasher, a psychologist at the University of Toronto whose research team first noticed the effect in the 1970s. "And the effect is likely more powerful when people are tired or distracted by other information."