By BENEDICT CAREY

For every congenial character who can warm a room, there’s another who can bring a chilling draft . Social iciness feels so cold to those on the receiving end that they will crave a hot drink, a new study has found.
The paper, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, is the latest finding from the field of embodied cognition, in which researchers have shown that the language of metaphor can activate physical sensations, and vice versa.
Research subjects who felt socially excluded perceived a significantly lower room temperature than those who felt included.
“We know that being excluded is psychologically painful,” said the lead author, Chen-Bo Zhong, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, “and here we found that it feels just like it’s described in metaphors,” like icy stare and frosty reception.
John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research, said the finding made “perfect sense.” In an e-mail message, he noted that a brain region called the insula tracks both body temperature and general psychological states, and it may be here where social perceptions and sensations of warmth or coldness are fused.
In the new paper, Dr. Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, also a psychologist at Toronto, describe two experiments.
In one, they split 65 students into two groups, instructing those in one to recall a time when they felt socially rejected, and those in the other to summon a memory of social acceptance.
Many of the students were recent immigrants and had fresh memories of being isolated in the dorms, left behind while roommates went out, Dr. Zhong said.
The researchers then had each of the participants estimate the temperature in the lab room.
The students who had recalled being excluded estimated the temperature to be, on average, 5 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the others.
In the second experiment, the researchers had 52 students play a computer game . The students “threw” a ball back and forth with three other figures on the computer screen that - so the participants thought - represented other students playing from remote locations.
In fact a computer program was running the game, and it excluded half the study participants, throwing them the virtual ball a couple of times in the beginning, then ignoring them altogether. The other group of students in the study were included in the virtual game of catch.
The participants in this study then rated their preferences for a variety of foods and drinks, including hot soup, coffee, an apple and crackers. Those who had been isolated in the computer game showed a strong preference for the soup and coffee over the other items; the included students had no such preference.
Dr. Zhong said the findings might explain some of the healing properties of chicken soup, as well suggest an alternative to ice cream as a balm for rejection. “Hot chocolate,” he said, “might be a better choice.”