BrainStuff Classics: Can Your Face's Temperature Reveal Your Mood?

Research shows that parts of a person's face grow cooler depending on their mood and stress level. Could this be used to help people in stressful jobs, like pilots? Learn more in this classic BrainStuff episode, based on this article: https://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/concentration-makes-face-grow-cooler.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Volga bomb here with a classic
episode from the archives. This one delves into the fascinating
finding that the human faces temperature tends to change based
on factors like stress level and concentration, and then how

(00:23):
technology might harness this data to make some jobs safer,
and whether that's a slippery slope. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren
Vogle bomb here. If you're anything like me, in moments
of embarrassment, your face may flush and suddenly feel warm,
But during times of intense concentration, the opposite is true.

(00:43):
You're more likely to keep a cool head, or rather
a cool face. According to new research, a study that
evaluated facial thermal temperatures revealed that as a person engages
in intense mental tasks, their face and in particular the
area around the nose, becomes cooler. The study, done by
researchers at the University of Nottingham's Institute for Airspace Technology

(01:04):
and published Indie journal Human Factors, paves the way towards
applying thermal cameras in the workplace as a tool to
assess how focused or possibly overwhelmed a worker might be,
which would be a little much for many work environments,
but could help prevent dangerous situations where people's safety depends
on a worker's concentration. One arena where a frazzled worker

(01:26):
could become a deadly serious concern is in the cockpit.
Passenger air traffic has doubled every fifteen years since the
nineteen eighties and is expected to double again by four
according to an Airbus Global Market forecast. The forecast predicts
that pilots may be operating in increasingly congested skies and
more often without copilots. If air traffic controllers and others

(01:49):
on the ground can detect through thermal facial imaging when
a pilot is in a moment of intense concentration, they
can offer to help, perhaps through remote control mechanisms, or
at least not further distract the philot with unnecessary communications.
To evaluate how temperatures within a person's face change during
periods of concentration, the researchers assembled fourteen students and faculty

(02:10):
members at their university and had them complete computer based
tasks of increasing difficulty. As the subjects completed each challenge,
their breathing and pulse rates were recorded, and a thermal
camera took detailed readings of temperature from previously mapped locations
on their faces. The researchers found that the link between
the difficulty of each task and the coolness of the

(02:30):
subject's facial temperatures was striking. Co author Alistair Campbell Ritchie
of the University of Nottingham's Bioengineering Research Group set in
a press release, we expected that mental demands on an
operator would result in physiological changes, but the direct correlation
between the workload and the skin temperature was very impressive
and counterintuitive. We were not expecting to see the face

(02:52):
getting colder. The results were later replicated among a sample
of pilots as they operated flights on simulated helicopters. We
spoke with Sarah Sharple's, professor of human factors at the
University of Nottingham and co author of the study. She
said there are a couple of possible explanations for why
the nose area in particular becomes cooler with increased concentration.

(03:13):
One is that breathing rate tends to increase as a
person's mental workload increases, and more air traveling through the
nose would decrease its temperature. The other is that during
periods of high mental workload, blood diverges to the prefrontal
cortex of the brain. That could mean, Sharples says, that
more blood is flowing away from the nose and towards
the brain. It could also be a combination of these factors.

(03:36):
Sharples added, however, that there were a few exceptions to
the cool nose phenomenon. For that reason, she says, we
would recommend, if this were to be used in a
real world context, that there be some baseline testing to
understand how close the relationship is in each individual between
facial temperature and workload. We also spoke with Archangelo Merla,
director of the Infrared Imaging Lab at the Institute for

(03:58):
Advanced Biomedical technolog G at Italy's University of Kiati Pascuera,
who agrees that baseline testing is critical when interpreting changes
in people's facial temperatures. Marla's research has shown that facial
temperatures can reveal a range of conditions, from whether or
not a person is lying, to feelings of fear or
stirrings of lust. Marla has also found that the temperature

(04:19):
of the nose often offers a key signal he said,
reading nose temperature is an effective physiological tool as an
indicator of a transition state, but the best approach is
to take into account changes in temperature across the entire face.
Apart from pilots, Sharples and visions that thermal cameras could
play a role in assessing workload and other settings, including

(04:39):
in factories where workers interact with large machinery. But if
the idea of your boss keeping tabs on you via
a thermal camera feels intrusively, big brethery, you're not alone.
Sharple's asks, for example, who would own a worker's thermal data,
the worker or the employer. She said, You can imagine
a situation where thermal imaging data intended for real time

(05:00):
monitoring could be stored and then presented during an end
of your performance report. It's my feeling that these kinds
of technologies will increase in the workplace, so we have
to make absolutely sure we deal with all the ethical, legal,
and social implications. Today's episode is based on the article

(05:22):
Concentration makes the Face Grow Cooler on how Stuff works
dot com, written by Amanda Onion. Brain Stuff is production
of My Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works
dot com and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts from my Heart Radio visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.