The mental nose and the Pinocchio effect: Thermography, planning, anxiety, and lies

Abstract

We applied thermography to cognitive neuropsychology, particularly as a somatic marker of subjective experience during cognitive and emotional tasks. We found significant correlations between changes in facial temperature and mental set. Specifically, the temperature of the nose tended to decrease during emotional tasks and increase during cognitive tasks. However, for stress tests or high arousal reactions to emotional stimuli, the direction of the thermal change depended on the nature of the setting, real or simulated. Detection of deception is a mixed field where cognitive effort, physiological stress, and empathy have evolved, affecting the direction of the thermal variation—higher or lower temperature of the tip of the nose and forehead. We found that the temperature change of the nose and forehead may enable detecting when people lie about facts (the Pinocchio effect markers). In general, one important contribution is to recover mental thermometry as a potent tool for neurocognitive studies.

Thermal Infrared Imaging-Based Affective Computing and Its Application to Facilitate Human Robot Interaction: A Review

“…Although no interaction effects for most ROI temperature slopes were found, a strong, statistically significant effect of the interaction between condition and emotion when evaluating the temperature slope on the nose tip was observed. This result confirms again the assumption that the nasal area is a salient region for emotion detection [32,67,[92][93][94][95]. Recent studies included applications with more challenging populations such as infants and children.…”

Effect of Facial Skin Temperature on the Perception of Anxiety: A Pilot Study

“…A positive correlation was also observed after the simulation practice in undergraduate students. These results confirmed that higher anxiety levels may be associated with the increase in the forehead temperature, as suggested by previous works [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]. Since the forehead area is one of the most stable temperature regions due to central vessel irrigation, thermal variations in this area are of great importance to provide information about stress diagnosis [ 30 , 33 ].…”

“…Particularly, greater thermal variations have been reported in the nose temperature under stressful conditions in comparison with the cheekbone and the forehead [ 21 ]. A similar behavior was observed in our study when comparing temperature variations before and after simulation [ 29 ]. Likewise, higher thermal gradients were found in postgraduate students due to higher differences in stress and anxiety levels between pre-test and post-test measurements.…”

“…The tip of the nose is another critical area for the detection of human emotions due to its high sensitivity [ 29 ]. Different temperature patterns have been described when comparing experiences concerning high mental or cognitive load with anxiety or emotional stress.…”

“…Similarly, higher quality compressions are associated with an increase in nose temperature values, as evidenced by the positive and significant correlation. With regard to the forehead area, the increase in temperature values can be positive and significantly correlated with a higher ratio of adequate chest compressions, thus indicating higher levels of mental load, cognitive effort or concentration [ 29 ], and thereby resulting in better CPR outcomes. In line with previous studies, the positive and significant correlation obtained when comparing the increase in maximum temperature values in the periorbital area with the number of compressions (BS group) indicates that temperature increments corresponding to higher concentration levels may lead to achieving adequate mean compressions without diminishing the compressions rate.…”