Innocent blushes share same pattern as sexual flushes

Ever blushed in an inappropriate situation, like when the doctor is listening to your heart? It turns out that the same regions of your face that redden during sexual stimulation also heat up, slightly, during innocent social interactions.

Amanda Hahn and colleagues at St Andrew's University in Fife, UK, used a heat-sensitive camera to map small changes of temperature in the faces of young heterosexual women while an experimenter touched them with an instrument they were told was measuring skin colour (it wasn't).

Touching the palm or elbow had no effect, but contact with the cheek or top of the breastbone raised the temperature around the eyes, mouth and nose by 0.2??C to 0.5??C on average, and by a full degree in certain spots. An earlier study found this area heats up in sexually aroused men.

The female subjects reported few or no feelings of arousal or embarrassment, but their facial temperature rose more when the experimenter was a young man.

"What is surprising is the magnitude," says Hahn. She now hopes to determine whether we are aware of these subtle changes in others, and if they affect how we interact.

Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0338

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