The nose knows: Thermal responses to active psychological stressors

Stress is an essential component of our lives. It helps to us to keep alert, stay motivated, and adapt to new and challenging situations. However, it is also a leading cause of poor mental wellbeing. Investigating psychological stress is essential to improving both the physical and mental health of the general population. Current methods often rely on self-report and physically invasive (contact) measures which can lack objectivity and ecological validity. Thermal imaging is emerging as a powerful objective, continuous, and physically non-invasive (non-contact) tool to investigate psychological stress through changes in nasal skin temperature. Yet there remain gaps in our understanding of thermal ranges, thermal recovery, and thermal associations with perceived stress in the healthy population. We present a new protocol, employing continuous thermal video to measure nasal temperature fluctuations during stress induction in healthy adults. Results indicate that induced psychological stress significantly decreases nasal temperature compared with a white noise baseline, and a social stress task elicited a significantly stronger nasal temperature decrease from baseline compared with a cognitive stress task. Although perceived stress was not associated with nasal thermal fluctuations, perceived somatic anxiety symptoms did significantly relate with nasal temperature change. These findings reveal new insight into the psychological and physiological human stress experience. The continuous, non-contact and objective benefits of thermal imaging makes it uniquely placed to contribute to real-world health applications, including translation to clinical and nonverbal populations across the lifespan.