You can actually give someone the cold shoulder. Literally. A paper written in Psychological Science says metaphors can trigger physical sensations. You can actually give someone the cold shoulder. Literally. A paper written by University of Toronto psychologists Dr Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli in Psychological Science says metaphors can trigger physical sensations. Researchers found that people who feel left out sense the temperature to be lower than those who feel part of the crowd. “We know being excluded is psychologically painful,” said Dr Zhong, “and we found it feels just like it’s described in metaphors.” In one experiment, volunteers were asked to recall social situations where they had been excluded and estimate the lab temperature. Students who recalled being left out estimated the temperature to be 5º Fahrenheit lower than did others. In another experiment, students played a computer game and were told they were playing a game with someone else at another location, but were actually playing a computer simulation. Next, half the students were told the ‘person’ at the other end had left them out of the game. These folk showed a marked preference for hot soup or coffee over cold beverages.
