Helping The Environment Will Make You Feel Warm (Quite Literally), Say Psychologists
Helping The Environment Will Make You Feel Warm (Quite Literally), Say Psychologists
PA / The Huffington Post UK
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If you need a cheap way of warming up during the colder months, then we might have a solution.
According to psychologists, doing an environmentally good deed gives you a warm feeling - quite literally.
A study found that when volunteers thought they were helping the environment, their perception of temperature changed. It was as if they were enveloped in a "warm glow".
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People classed as environmentally "friendly" estimated the temperature around them to be around 1C higher than those led to believe their behaviour was environmentally "unfriendly".
The report authors, led by Danny Taufik, from the University of Griningen in the Netherlands, wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change: "Acting environmentally friendly boosts a person's self-concept, which is reflected in a literal warm glow.
"We also explored whether physical warmth (skin temperature) is affected by acting environmentally friendly, but we found no consistent evidence for this."
Students taking part in the study completed a questionnaire about their carbon footprint, and were told that lower scores indicated environmentally friendly behaviour.
They were then given a fake carbon footprint score for the "average" student, against which their own scores were compared.
Participants were also asked to guess the temperature of the room in which they were sitting.
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13 Amazing Environmental Facts
(01 of13)
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The amount of water on Earth is constant, and continually recycled over time: some of the water you drink will have passed through a dinosaur. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(02 of13)
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40 percent of all bottled water sold in the world is bottled tap water. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(03 of13)
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27,000 trees are felled each day for toilet paper. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(04 of13)
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Paper can be recycled only six times. After that, the fibers are too weak to hold together. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(05 of13)
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There is no known scientific way of predicting earthquakes. The most reliable method is to count the number of missing cats in the local paper: if it trebles, an earthquake is imminent. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(06 of13)
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Cat originally means 'dog.' The word comes from the Latin catulus, a small dog or puppy. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(07 of13)
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Humans and elephants are the only animals with chins. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(08 of13)
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Beavers have transparent eyelids so they can see underwater with their eyes shut. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(09 of13)
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Octopuses have three hearts. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(10 of13)
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The 100,000 trillion ants in the world weigh about the same as all human beings. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(11 of13)
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As soon as tiger shark embryos develop teeth they attack and eat each other in the womb. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(12 of13)
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There are more than 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
(13 of13)
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Dolphins shed the top layer of their skin every two hours. (credit:Shutterstock / Facts sourced from the book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Knock Your Socks Off.")
Those whose carbon footprints appeared to be more environmentally friendly than average rated the room significantly warmer than students whose scores were less friendly.
The researchers concluded that helping the environment was intrinsically rewarding, which was something that should be recognised by "green" campaigns.
For instance, informing people they could help protect the environment by unplugging unused electronic devices may be a better strategy than telling them it will save money.
Future research could explore the extent to which acting in an environmentally friendly way might influence warmth-related behaviours such as setting central heating thermostats, said the scientists.
They added that other work had shown a negative psychological state caused by feeling lonely resulted in lower perceived temperatures, and also prompted people to take warmer showers "presumably to make one feel better".