How might this work? One likely mechanism is through the autonomic nervous system. Research has shown that things like heart rate, levels of respiration and other involuntary physiological responses are affected by social connectedness. Thus, when people feel excluded, blood vessels at the periphery of the body (in the fingertips, for example) may narrow, preserving core body heat. This classic protective mechanism is known as vasoconstriction.

A number of research groups, including labs in Canada, Poland and our own in the Netherlands, have reported that having the memory of being socially excluded — or just feeling “different” from others in a room — is enough to change our perception of the environment around us. Such feelings can prime individuals to sense, for example, that a room in which they’re standing is significantly colder than it is.

Notably, touching something warm after a feeling of ostracism — like holding a warm cup of coffee — is enough to halt and even reverse some of these autonomic responses. It seems as if the body can be fooled into feeling welcomed by applying a little warmth in the right places. And the effect is reciprocal: studies in our own lab and at Yale have found that adults and young children are more social after they’ve touched something warm.

The findings, of course, don’t just explain why so many lonely souls while away the hours at Starbucks, embracing a warm cup of joe. They have profound psychological implications. Relational models theory, introduced by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, proposes that people engage in just four basic types of relationships. The most ancient of these, evolutionarily speaking, is communal sharing, in which people give according to ability and take according to need (as with a mother and her infant, or between spouses). Communal sharing relationships are typically formed and sustained through acts that connect the physical body, like touching or sharing bodily fluids. And such actions typically involve the sensation of being physically warm — something we instinctively find essential.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding how feeling and memory affect our bodies, and how thermal cues from the environment affect our social interactions. But one thing is clear: humans everywhere connect the notions of warmth with welcoming, and cold with social exclusion. Linguistic links between these conceptual pairings can be found in Dutch, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, Finnish and a host of other languages. These pervasive associations, alongside research findings from studies in children, suggest that such mind-body connections are universal.