Facial skin blood flow response during exposure to emotionally‐charged movie

Abstract

While it is known that emotional arousal affects skin sympathetic nerve activity of a limb, an influence of emotional challenge on facial skin blood flow regulated by sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve was still unclear. We examined the facial skin blood flow response to audiovisually‐elicited emotion using two dimensional laser Doppler imaging. The facial skin blood flow, as well as forearm skin blood flow, heart rate (HR), and mean arterial blood pressure (MAP), was measured during 2 min of neutral (landscape) and positive (comedy) movies in nine subjects. The subjective extent of pleasantness or unpleasantness was estimated using rating scores from ‐5 (the most unpleasant) to 5 (the most pleasant). The average facial skin blood flow decreased (P<0.05) during comedy movie, while the facial skin blood flow did not change significantly during landscape movie. The decrease in facial skin blood flow during comedy movie was significantly correlated with the subjective rating of the pleasantness. The forearm skin blood flow, HR, and MAP did not change significantly during the two movies. These results suggest that the more emotion becomes positive, the more neurally‐mediated vasoconstriction occurs in facial skin blood vessels. Furthermore, facial skin blood flow rather than limb skin blood flow, HR, and MAP may help us to assess emotion quantitatively.