The holiday season is upon us, and with it comes an abundance of warm embraces—greeting relatives at the door, gathering around festive tables, exchanging heartfelt goodbyes. This may be a good thing. According to new research, those warm hugs are doing far more than spreading holiday cheer. They’re actually helping us feel more connected to our own bodies.

A new review published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences examines how thermoception—our ability to perceive warm and cold sensations through the skin—shapes our sense of body ownership, that basic feeling that our body belongs to us.

“Temperature is one of our most ancient senses,” says Dr. Laura Crucianelli, a lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the review. “Warmth is one of the earliest signals of protection – we feel it in the womb, in early caregiving, and whenever someone holds us close. It keeps us alive, but it also helps us feel like ourselves.”

The research, co-authored with Professor Gerardo Salvato of the University of Pavia in Italy, synthesizes decades of findings in neuroscience, psychology, and clinical science, revealing a previously overlooked pathway through which the body communicates with the brain.

The skin houses specialized thermoreceptors that detect temperature changes as subtle as 0.1 degrees Celsius. These receptors send signals to the insular cortex—a brain region central to our conscious experience of bodily states through interoception. The posterior insula handles implicit sensory functions, while the anterior insula brings these signals into conscious awareness, assigning emotional meaning to physical sensations.

Evidence for temperature’s role in body ownership comes from experiments using the rubber hand illusion, where participants watch a fake hand being stroked while their real hand, hidden from view, receives simultaneous touches. Under certain conditions, people begin to feel as though the rubber hand belongs to them. Researchers discovered that this illusion was accompanied by measurable drops in skin temperature of the real hand.

Clinical observations provide even more compelling evidence. Stroke patients with damage to the right hemisphere who experience disturbed sensations of ownership over their paralyzed limbs show lower hand temperatures bilaterally compared to patients without such disturbances. Lesion mapping revealed that damage to the right posterior insula correlated with reduced hand temperature.

The implications extend to psychiatric conditions as well. People with anorexia nervosa show altered temperature responses during body ownership experiments, while individuals with body integrity dysphoria—a rare condition involving feelings that a healthy limb doesn’t belong to them—display unusual thermal patterns when attention is directed to the unwanted limb.

“We now know from experimental studies that thermal signals play a fundamental role in clinical conditions,” explains Dr. Salvato. “People with altered temperature regulation and temperature perception, due to a brain stroke, may develop pathological conditions according to which they do not recognize part of their bodies as belonging to themselves.”

The researchers propose two theoretical frameworks to explain these connections. The allostatic-interoceptive hypothesis suggests that the brain actively regulates physiological states to maintain a coherent sense of body ownership, strategically downregulating thermal input when integrating new sensory information. The physiological withdrawal hypothesis proposes that when body ownership is altered, the cognitive system withdraws resources from body parts no longer experienced as “mine.”

Beyond the laboratory, these findings carry implications for clinical care. Understanding the thermal-ownership connection could inform rehabilitation strategies for neurological patients, improve prosthetic design by incorporating thermal feedback, and guide mental health interventions for conditions involving body image disturbance.

“Warm touch reminds us that we are connected, valued, and part of a social world,” Dr. Crucianelli observes. “Humans are wired for social closeness, and hugs briefly dissolve the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘other.’”

As global temperatures become increasingly extreme due to climate change, human thermoregulation will face greater strain, potentially affecting processes linked to bodily self-awareness. Future climate adaptation policies may need to account for these effects on psychological well-being.

So this holiday season, science offers an additional reason to embrace loved ones. When we hug, the combination of tactile and thermal signals grounds us more firmly in our embodied sense of self. In the researchers’ words: “We feel, ‘this is my body, and I am grounded in it.’”

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Endnotes:

1. Salvato, G., & Crucianelli, L. (2025). Shaping bodily self-awareness through thermosensory signals. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.11.008
2. Queen Mary University of London. (2025, December 4). New research reveals why warm hugs make us feel so good about ourselves [Press release]. EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1108522
3. Craig, A.D. (2002). How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 655–666.
4. Moseley, G.L., et al. (2008). Psychologically induced cooling of a specific body part caused by the illusory ownership of an artificial counterpart. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 13169–13173.
5. Trojan, J., et al. (2018). The rubber hand illusion induced by visual-thermal stimulation. Scientific Reports, 8, 12417.