Friday, June 25th, 2010

A Soft Life, With Rough Spots

You 'feel warmly' towards some people, even if you've had a 'hard day.' But can those touch-centered descriptors influence how you experience the world? Writing in the journal Science, researchers describe how touching certain textures of objects can alter a person's perception of other events. For instance, touching puzzle pieces covered with sandpaper made participants in the experiment less likely to describe a social interaction as having gone smoothly than if the participants had held smooth puzzle pieces. Holding heavy objects during a job interview made the interviewer more likely to give 'more weight' to the person being interviewed. We'll talk about the study, and what it might tell us about the human brain.