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.

Disgust sensitivity is related to a wide variety of psychological constructs (e.g., moral decision-making, political ideology, person perception) and psychopathological disorders (e.g., anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders). In the present article, we aim to provide more insight into the basic information processing strategies associated with individual differences in disgust sensitivity by examining three attentional biases (vigilance, maintenance, and avoidance) for disgust stimuli. Using eye tracking methodology, two studies (N = 135 & N = 149) found that the processing of disgust stimuli by disgust sensitive individuals is characterized exclusively by avoidance. This finding is in line with the idea that more disgust sensitive individuals have a more sensitive pathogen threat alert system. Interestingly, disgust sensitive individuals showed a similar attentional avoidance bias for other negative stimuli.