title: The mental and subjective skin: Emotion, empathy, feelings and thermography.
abstract: We applied thermography to investigate the cognitive neuropsychology of emotions, using it as a somatic marker of subjective experience during emotional tasks. We obtained results that showed significant correlations between changes in facial temperature and mental set. The main result was the change in the temperature of the nose, which tended to decrease with negative valence stimuli but to increase with positive emotions and arousal patterns. However, temperature change was identified not only in the nose, but also in the forehead, the oro-facial area, the cheeks and in the face taken as a whole. Nevertheless, thermic facial changes, mostly nasal temperature changes, correlated positively with participants' empathy scores and their performance. We found that temperature changes in the face may reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions and feelings like love.
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain. Electronic address: elvisalazar@gmail.com.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Salazar-López
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Domínguez
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Juárez Ramos
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de la Fuente
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Meins
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: O
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Iborra
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gálvez
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Rodríguez-Artacho
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Mente Cerebro y Comportamiento (CIMCYC), University of Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gómez-Milán
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology*; D001831:Body Temperature / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D004645:Empathy / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013817:Thermography / Q000379:methods*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Arousal; Emotional valence; Empathy; Facial temperature; Subjective experience; Thermography