The mental and subjective skin: Emotion, empathy, feelings and thermography

• Valence and arousal of IAPS produces different thermal changes measured in the face.
• Valence effect refers to a facial thermal increment when observing positive images.
• Arousal effect refers to a facial thermal increment when observing high arousal images.
• Temperature can be a somatic marker of a subjective experience, for example love.

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.