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? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vocal 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.
You're more likely to keep a cool head, or rather
a cool face. According to new research, a study that

(00:24):
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 Aerospace Technology
and published Indie journal Human Factors, paves the way towards
applying thermal cameras in the workplace as a tool to

(00:45):
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 a you know where a
frazzled worker could become a deadly serious concern is in
the cockpit. Passenger air traffic has doubled every fifteen years

(01:08):
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 and increasingly congested
skies and more often without copilots. If air traffic controllers
and others on the ground can detect through thermal facial
imaging when a pilot is in a moment of intense concentration,

(01:29):
they can offer to help, perhaps through remote control mechanisms,
or at least not further distract the pilot with unnecessary communications.
To evaluate how temperatures within a person's face change during
periods of concentration, the researchers assembled fourteen students and faculty
members at their university and had them complete computer based
tasks of increasing difficulty. As the subjects completed each challenge,

(01:52):
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
subject's facial temperatures was striking. Co author Alistair Campbell Ritchie
of the University of Nottingham's Bioengineering Research Group said in

(02:14):
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
getting colder. The results were later replicated among a sample
of pilots as they operated flights on simulated helicopters. We

(02:35):
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.
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

(02:58):
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.
Sharpe's 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

(03:19):
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
Advanced Biomedical Technology at Italy's University of Kiati Pascuera, who
agrees that baseline testing is critical when interpreting changes in

(03:41):
people's facial temperatures. Merla'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. Merla has also found that the temperature of
the nose often offers a key signal. He said, reading
nose temperature is an effective physic theological tool as an
indicator of a transition state, but the best approach is

(04:04):
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
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.

(04:24):
Sharples 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
monitoring could be stored and then presented during an end
of year 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,

(04:46):
and social implications. Today's episode was written by Amanda Onion
and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more
on this end lots of other cool topics, visit our
home planet, How staff Works dot com. M