The Nose Knows

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 contact measures which can lack in objectivity and ecological validity. Thermal imaging is emerging as a powerful objective, continuous and non-contact tool to investigate psychological stress through changes in nasal skin temperature. Yet, there remains gaps in our understanding of thermal ranges, thermal recovery and thermal associa-tions with perceived stress in the healthy population. We present a new protocol, employing continu-ous 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 asso-ciated with nasal thermal fluctuations, perceived somatic anxiety symptoms did significantly relate with nasal temperature change. These findings reveal new insight into the psychological and physio-logical human stress experience. The continuous, non-contact and objective benefits of thermal imag-ing makes it uniquely placed to contribute to real-world health applications, including translation to clinical and nonverbal populations across the lifespan.