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The last decade saw rapid growth of the body of work devoted to relations between social thermoregulation and various other domains, with a particular focus on the connection between prosociality and physical warmth. This paper reports on a first systematic cross-linguistic study of the exponents of conceptual metaphor AFFECTION IS WARMTH (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Grady, 1997), which provides the motivation for the large share of research in this area. Assumed to be universal, it enables researchers, mostly speakers of major European languages, to treat words like warm and cold as self-evident and easily translatable between languages – both in their concrete uses (to feel warm/cold) and as applied to interpersonal relationships (a cold/warm person, warm feelings, etc.). Based on a sample of 94 languages from all around the world and using methodology borrowed from typological linguistics and mixed-effects regression modelling, we show that the relevant expressions show a remarkably skewed distribution and seem to be absent or extremely marginal in the majority of language families and linguistic macro-areas. The study demonstrates once again the dramatic influence of the Anglocentric, Standard Average European, and WEIRD perspectives on many of the central concepts and conclusions in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive research and discusses how changing this perspective can impact research in social psychology in general and in social thermoregulation in particular. Keywords: AFFECTION IS WARMTH, cross-linguistic comparison, metaphor, temperature, linguistic universal, semantic typology How to Cite: Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M., & Nikolaev, D. (2021). Talking About Temperature and Social Thermoregulation in the Languages of the World. International Review of Social Psychology, 34(1), 22. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.410 Handling Editor: Lynott Dermot Lancaster, GB X close 261 Views 62 Downloads 6 Twitter   Published on 12 Aug 2021 Peer Reviewed  CC BY 4.0  Accepted on 16 Dec 2020            Submitted on 14 Feb 2020 1. Introduction On hearing that someone is warm, you will understand that we are talking about a friendly person, someone who shows affection and enthusiasm, and is in general fairly nice. But why warm? Is it pure chance that we use the same adjective, warm, for describing people and for talking about concrete temperature perception, as in warm water or it is warm here? Or is there a deeper connection between these uses and experiences underlying them? These questions have attracted considerable attention from both psychologists and linguists. Starting with social psychology, there has been much experimental research on the connection between warmth and affection. In a seminal experiment by Williams and Bargh (2008), the participants who had held a warm versus cold beverage later appreciated other people as more versus less generous and caring (i.e., having a warmer or colder personality), therefore providing evidence for a deeper association between prosociality and physical warmth. Similar results were obtained in conceptually related experiments, for example, the participants holding warm beverages in IJzerman and Semin (2009) judged themselves as emotionally closer to their friends and relatives (see also Fay & Maner, 2012; Schilder et al., 2014 for other examples), but have not been replicated in others (e.g., Lynott et al., 2014). As noted in IJzerman, Neyroud, et al. (2018), the period between 2008 and 2018 saw more than 80 published and unpublished reports on the relation between social thermoregulation (i.e., interpersonal relationships as crucially linked or even organized by processes of body temperature regulation) and various other domains. To give a few examples, there are studies showing that daily perceptions of physical warmth co-fluctuate with feeling social (Fetterman et al., 2017), that diversity in social networks helps to protect core body temperature against the cold (IJzerman, Lindenberg, et al., 2018), and that coldness makes people think about loved ones (IJzerman, Neyroud, et al., 2018).

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