London - Feeling loved really can give you a warm glow inside.
Declarations of support and affection actually leave us feeling physically warmer, claim scientists.
They also discovered that holding a heated object can boost our closeness to others. Using MRI scans, they found feelings of social and physical warmth both result in increased activity in the same part of the brain.
Despite emotional bonds being fundamental to human happiness, little is known about how our brain forms social connections.
The findings suggest closeness to others creates feelings of contentment as it triggers the same physical responses involved when keeping warm.
“Together, these results suggest a potential mechanism by which social warmth, the contented subjective experience of feeling loved and connected to other people, has become such a pleasant experience and led credence to the description of connection experiences as ‘heartwarming’,” the University of California team wrote.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 20 participants, with an average age of 20.
As part of the experiment, close family or friends supplied either a message of appreciation for the participant or a simple fact about them.
Examples of the positive notes included “whenever I’m completely lost, you’re the person I turn to’ and ‘I love you more than anything in the world”, while neutral included “you have curly hair” and “I’ve known you for 10 years”.
During the experiment, brain scans were also taken and after completing each task, participants rated how warm and how socially connected they felt on a scale of one (not at all) to seven (very).
In the first task, individuals either read two positive or two neutral messages. After reading the former, participants rated their warmth as 6.14 on average, compared to 3.8 after reading neutral facts.
The researchers said the findings supported the conclusion that there is “an interplay between social and physical warmth”.
In the second task, participants held a warm pack and a room-temperature ball for 10 seconds each, repeating this five times.
Simply holding the heated object led to higher ratings of connection, 2.47, than holding the ball, 1.63.
Co-authors Tristen Inagaki and Dr Naomi Eisenberger said processes involved in maintaining warm core body temperature “may have been co-opted to maintain social warmth” during human evolution.
The team said their results suggest physical warmth could be used to help alleviate certain social problems.
“Given the importance of social connections for general well-being and happiness, this may inform larger interventions designed to combat feelings of isolation or loneliness through temperature manipulations,” they wrote. - Daily Mail