Investigating the Physiology Behind Nose Thermal Response to Stress: A Cross-Mapping Approach

InfraRed Thermography (IRT) is an innovative monitoring tool, very beneficial in the field of psychophysiology to assess mental states in a completely non-invasive manner. IRT is contactless and it measures the temperature of the skin remotely. Thermal patterns of the skin are driven by the autonomic nervous system, thus, they reflect autonomic responses to affective stimuli. Insights into the physiology be hind changes in facial thermal patterns could improve our thermography based inferences reaching greater emotional specificity. Here, we used a cross-mapping approach to investigate the nonlinear correlations between IRT and heart rate variability (HRV), which is a powerful tool for characterizing cardiovascular activity. We used thermal signals of the nose and HRV data from 30 subjects during a resting state and under a stressful stimulation task. Our results show a statistically significant nonlinear correlation between the time series, with a significant increase in the correlation values during the stressor. Our preliminary results give a foundation to the hypothesis that the stress-induced decrease in the nose temperature is related to sympathetic induced vasomotor activity.