Warm It Up with Love: The Effect of Physical Coldness on Liking of Romance Movies

Abstract

Are romance movies more desirable when people are cold? Building on research on (bodily) feeling-as-information and embodied cognition, we hypothesize that physical coldness activates a need for psychological warmth, which in turn leads to an increased liking for romance movies. Four laboratory experiments and an analysis of online movie rental data provide support for our hypothesis. Specifically, studies 1A and 1B show that physical coldness increases the liking of and willingness to pay for romance movies. Study 2 shows that the effect of physical coldness on liking of romance movies only occurs for people who associate romance movies with psychological warmth. Study 3 shows that people correct for the influence of physical coldness on their liking of romance movies when physical coldness is made salient. In study 4, using data on online movie rentals and historical temperature, we found a negative relationship between weather temperature and preference for romance movies.

Affect as a Decision-Making System of the Present

“…For example, we would predict that subjective experiences of fluency would have more influence on judgments of fame or truth when the target is temporally proximate than when it is temporally distant. Indeed, there is growing evidence that feelings tend to operate in a similar manner regardless of whether they are affective, cognitive, or bodily (Greifeneder et al 2011; see also Hong and Sun 2012).…”

Modernizing Relationship Therapy through Social Thermoregulation Theory: Evidence, Hypotheses, and Explorations

“…Yet, other effects did replicate (IJzerman and Semin, 2009;Schilder et al, 2014;Inagaki et al, 2015;Ebersole et al, 2016;IJzerman et al, 2016). Further, original studies with larger Ns do exist, with some studies with participant samples between 100 and 500 (e.g., IJzerman et al, 2015b;Van Acker et al, 2016), and some outliers even with samples around 30,000 (Hong and Sun, 2012) and above 6 million (Zwebner et al, 2013). We think that the criticisms should likely be directed at better specifying the models relevant for social thermoregulation theory, for which we see this paper as an important step in the right direction.…”

“…Psychological research has consistently shown that temperature fluctuations (either outside or lab temperature) is causally tied to social behaviors ranging from renting romance movies (Hong and Sun, 2012) to house-purchasing decisions (Van Acker et al, 2016) to basic effects on perception, language use, and memory (IJzerman and Semin, 2009;Schilder et al, 2014;Messer et al, 2017). The effect also works the other way around: if people feel the environment to be socially unpredictable, they perceive temperatures as lower, whereas the reverse is true if people feel psychologically safe (Zhong and Leonardelli, 2008;IJzerman and Semin, 2010;IJzerman et al, 2015bIJzerman et al, , 2016Ebersole et al, 2016).…”

Homelike thermoregulation: How physical coldness makes an advertised house a home

“…IJzerman and colleagues, 2015). But as effective as relationships may be in relating to others, a house may well have (partly) replaced those socially borne functions, in the same way as lower temperatures sparks attachment to other people and can be fulfilled through renting romance movies (Hong & Sun, 2012) or feeling nostalgic (Zhou et al, 2012). We will explicate and empirically validate how houses offer a socially supportive function -fulfilling the "need to affiliate" through "feeling at home" -all of it fulfilling thermoregulatory needs.…”

“…Whereas spreading activation effects revealed assimilative effects like gaging an experimenter as closer, other research has observed complementary effects in case of coldness. Hong and Sun (2012), for instance, discovered that physical coldness yields increased liking of romance movies and novels, whereas Zhou and colleagues (2012) found that nostalgia -a positive and social emotion -is triggered by coldness. Zhang and Risen (2014) found self-regulatory properties of people preferring socially warm activities in the cold, while Kolb, Gockel and Werth (2012;see also Bargh & Shalev, 2012) learned that physical coldness triggers a Need For Affiliation in sales-people, letting them affiliate more with their customers.…”