Feeling Lonely? Take a Warm Bath

We often talk about personality in physical terms. Whether it's someone giving us the "cold shoulder" or being a "warm" individual, it's not uncommon to reference, say, temperature when describing the people we know. The idea is that we deal with abstract psychological states the best way we know how — we take them literally. This linking of the mental and physical can lead us to act in some surprising ways.

Take loneliness as an example. Through early experiences with caretakers whose trust and comfort often goes hand-in-hand with physical warmth, physical temperature seems to have become indistinguishable, on some level, from psychological feelings of connectedness. Indeed, some of the same