Sensation

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 atrip around the senses, revealing the amazing extent to which our externalenvironment profoundly shapes our thoughts, emotions and decisions about everythingfrom 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 weunconsciously equate height with power, weight with importance, cleanlinesswith morality. Drawing on evidence from her own studies and those of otherleading 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 conceptsare linked in the brain, and asks: how can we use this information to ouradvantage? The answer: we can change people's perceptions of us, disarm aggressivenegotiators, boost our creativity and much more, all byharnessing the untapped power of our physical intelligence.