The temperature of emotions

Abstract

Emotions and temperature are closely related through embodied processes, and people seem to associate temperature concepts with emotions. While this relationship is often evidenced by everyday language (e.g., cold and warm feelings), what remains missing to date is a systematic study that holistically analyzes how and why people associate specific temperatures with emotions. The present research aimed to investigate the associations between temperature concepts and emotion adjectives on both explicit and implicit levels. In Experiment 1, we evaluated explicit associations between twelve pairs of emotion adjectives derived from the circumplex model of affect, and five different temperature concepts ranging from 0°C to 40°C, based on responses from 403 native speakers of four different languages (English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese). The results of Experiment 1 revealed that, across languages, the temperatures were associated with different regions of the circumplex model. The 0°C and 10°C were associated with negative-valanced, low-arousal emotions, while 20°C was associated with positive-valanced, low-to-medium-arousal emotions. Moreover, 30°C was associated with positive-valanced, high-arousal emotions; and 40°C was associated with high-arousal and either positive- or negative-valanced emotions. In Experiment 2 (N = 102), we explored whether these temperature-emotion associations were also present at the implicit level, by conducting Implicit Association Tests (IATs) with temperature words (cold and hot) and opposing pairs of emotional adjectives for each dimension of valence (Unhappy/Dissatisfied vs. Happy/Satisfied) and arousal (Passive/Quiet vs. Active/Alert) on native English speakers. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that participants held implicit associations between the word hot and positive-valanced and high-arousal emotions. Additionally, the word cold was associated with negative-valanced and low-arousal emotions. These findings provide evidence for the existence of temperature-emotion associations at both explicit and implicit levels across languages.

How weather impacts expressed sentiment in Russia: evidence from Odnoklassniki

“…Not all cases achieved complete agreement with existing studies; in our opinion, this is expected and generally aligns with a variety of findings presented in this area of research (see Barbosa Escobar et al (2021) ). First, other studies have been carried out for other countries or regions with different climates, and as a result, we can expect different associations.…”

Assessing Mechanisms Behind Crossmodal Associations between Visual Textures and Temperature Concepts

“…On the one hand, different temperatures can influence emotional states (Noelke et al, 2016), and on the other hand, individuals' emotions can affect their ambient temperature perception and thermal comfort (Wang & Liu, 2020). Relevant to the present study, people from different countries tend to associate different temperature concepts with different emotions consistently (Barbosa Escobar et al, 2021). The latter authors found that people associate lower temperatures with negatively valenced, low arousal emotions, comfortable ambient temperatures with positively valenced, low-to-medium arousal emotions, and higher temperatures with positively valenced, high-arousal emotions, respectively.…”

“…Due to the nature of the dimensions involved, as Barbosa Escobar et al (2021) suggested, associations between visual textures and temperature may lie somewhere in the broad spectrum of crossmodal associations, with semantic congruence on one end and crossmodal correspondence on the other (Parise, 2016). The former refers to pairs of stimuli that are tied to the same identity or meaning (Chen & Spence, 2010), whereas the latter refers to links between low-level features from sensory modalities (Parise & Spence, 2013;Spence, 2011).…”

Ambient Temperature in Online Service Environments

“…In the main study, prior to viewing one randomly selected stimulus, participants indicated their mood (Peterson and Sauber 1983) and ATLoc (Barbosa Escobar et al 2021), both measures embedded in a series of questions designed to help participants ease into the study. After taking the virtual tour, participants completed measures of telepresence (as in Study 1), perceived illumination (Tsushima et al 2020), ATOS (Krause et al 2020), warmth and competence (Halkias and Diamantopoulos, 2020), customer-company identification (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 2006), and a comprehensive set of outcome variables (purchase intentions, word-of-mouth communications, and willingness-to-pay; Zeithaml and Parasuraman, 1996).…”