Reason to serve hot cocoa and wassail at holiday gatherings!

Sorry my posts on here are never too personal. I like to post stuff that I think you guys will find interesting. But, just so you know, I think  you all are wonderful and you make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Life is good, with possibly an exciting thing or two on the horizon. I'll let you know. I'm currently reading The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaffer and Perelandra. Now, on to the interesting stuff. (from the NYTimes.com, a really cool piece great ideas from this year.)
Cold-Shoulder Science
By MATTHEW HUTSON
The warm welcome and the cold shoulder, it turns out, are more than mere metaphors. This year, two sets of studies revealed that feelings of social connection and sensory experience are related on a deep psychological level: getting the cold shoulder literally gives you the chills, and actual warmth can melt a figuratively frosty heart.

Research published in the journal Psychological Science by Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli at the University of Toronto found that subjects who were asked to recall anexperience of social exclusion and then asked to estimate the lab’s ambient temperature gave estimates that were more than four degrees colder than those given by subjects who’d been asked to recall an experience of inclusion. And subjects ignored during a ball-tossing game in the lab had a larger postgame appetite for hot coffee and hot soup than did players who’d seen more action.

In another experiment, published in the journal Science by the psychologists Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John Bargh, of Yale, subjects were asked to hold a cup of either hot coffee or iced coffee for a moment on the way to the lab. Then they were asked to evaluate the personality of someone based on a written description. Those who held a hot drink found the individual more caring and generous than did the other subjects. In a companion experiment, holding a hot therapeutic pad induced subjects to act more generously.

Viewing cognition as responsive to physical cues, Williams explains, “takes into account the fact that we are physical beings” and that bodily and environmental factors “impact the ways our thoughts are structured.” The researchers studying the phenomenon argue that we probably learned to associate affection with warmth from childhood experiences of being held by a caregiver.

With the new data in hand, it’s tempting to suspect that the current economic climate is leaving investors out in the cold in more ways than one. On Sept. 29, when the Dow suffered its largest point-drop in history, only one stock among the Standard & Poor’s 500 rose: the Campbell Soup Company.