https://cognitiveclassics.blogs.sas.ac.uk/

I am feeling my way back into blogging by means of these short posts, and here is a quick notice about something I should have mentioned aged ago — the Cognitive Classics website, run by Katharine Earnshaw and Felix Budelmann. It’s good stuff overall, but I would pick out especially the superb bibliography, organised thematically, by Emily Troscianko (her website here). It offers some excellent orientation in the psychological studies and in their application to literature.

Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)

I am very pleased to see this book out — the second of four parts of The Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition. This grew out of some excellent seminars held a few years ago, and the whole thing has been steered superbly by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler, two people from whom I have learned a great deal. Many excellent essays are within, and I am in the book too, writing about how Ben Jonson depicts his characters interacting with a world of goods in the marketplace. It allowed me to write about Bartholomew Fair, which is always a pleasure, and about Elizabethan songs made out of street cries, which I mentioned on the blog back here.

T.K. Inagaki and L.J. Human, ‘Physical and Social Warmth: Warmer Daily Body Temperature Is Associated with Greater Feelings of Social Connection’, Emotion (2019), advance online publication, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000618.

I have this idea that over the summer I will find more time and energy for this blog, and that’s a nice idea. In the meantime I cannot let this interesting essay pass by without comment. I was alerted to it by the Twitter feed of my colleague Simone Schnall, who is a wise observer of the fortunes of embodied cognition. I said just before Christmas that doubt had been shed on one of the more eye-catching findings in the field. Attempts to replicate experiments showing that bodily warmth led to greater social affection were not going well; you can find my post here.
      Inagaki and Human found that changes in body temperature correlated with feelings of ‘social connection’: warmer, more connected, cooler, less. Of course the classic and possibly fragile ‘holding a warm drink in your hand makes you like people more’ finding by Williams and Bargh is not the only bit of the jigsaw. As I said in my earlier post, I very much relish the way that this idea is both entirely intuitive (yes, warmth, the word bridges these things) and counter-intuitive (can I really be as simple as that?). I’m glad to see it flourishing again.