Warm temperatures make us temporarily friendlier. The colour red causes us to perform poorly on tests. Heavy clipboards make the CVs clipped to them seem more impressive. Clean smells promote moral behaviour. Sports teams in black jerseys are given more penalties than teams in other colours. In Sensation, leading psychologist Thalma Lobel takes us on a trip around the senses, revealing the amazing extent to which our external environment profoundly shapes our thoughts, emotions and decisions about everything from the people we like to the way we work. She reveals how holding something warm can make us friendlier; how we perceive people as nicer if we know they like sweet foods; how we unconsciously equate height with power, weight with importance, cleanliness with morality. Drawing on evidence from her own studies and those of other leading researchers, Lobel reveals the psychology behind these remarkable findings for the first time to a general readership. She looks in particular at how abstract and physical concepts are linked in the brain, and asks: how can we use this information to our advantage? The answer: we can change people s perceptions of us, disarm aggressive negotiators, boost our creativity and much more, all by harnessing the untapped power of our physical intelligence. AUTHOR: Thalma Lobel is an internationally recognised psychologist, a member of the Executive Board of Tel Aviv University and director of the child development center there. She has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Tufts, UC San Diego, and NYU. She appears frequently on television and radio.
