With Hot Coffee, We See a Warm Heart, Yale Researchers Find - "Our judgment of a person’s character can be influenced by something as simple as the warmth of the drink we hold in our hand."
https://news.yale.edu/2008/10/23/hot...searchers-find

Yale University psychologists show that people judged others to be more generous and caring if they had just held a warm cup of coffee and less so if they had held an iced coffee.

To test their hypothesis about the importance of temperature, research assistants casually asked that the undergraduate test subjects briefly hold either a warm cup of coffee or iced coffee as they wrote down information. The subjects were then given a packet of information about an individual and then asked to assess his or her personality traits. The participants assessed the person as significantly “warmer” if they had previously held the warm cup of coffee rather than the iced cup of coffee. On personality scales unrelated to the trait of “warmth,” the researchers found no difference in how participants who held an iced, versus hot, coffee responded.

“It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well,” Bargh said. “Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer – more generous and trusting – as well.”

The demonstration of the power of temperature on character assessment has been supported by recent brain imaging studies, Bargh noted. For instance, the experience of hot or cold stimulus has been shown to trigger strong activity in the insular cortex. Researchers have also implicated the same area of the brain in borderline personality disorder, a debilitating illness characterized by an inability to cooperate and near complete inability to determine whom to trust.


This is interesting, something as simple as holding a cup of coffee can affect how we view ourselves and others. Our assessment of ourselves and others may not be as reliable as we had thought.