Principle on temperature response to the stress-strain variation is fundamental to the relationship between thermal radiation variation and stress-strain field. Current research indicates that temperature has a sensitive response to rock deformation under the condition of normal temperature background. However, the basic physical relationship between deformation and temperature variation is not clear and need to be investigated further. In this paper, principle on temperature response to stress-strain variation is studied in detail, based on thermodynamics, elastic strain theory, and experiments on both ideal material and rock. In the stage of elastic deformation, results indicate that: 1) temperature increment is positively correlated with volume strain variation. Temperature rises with hydrostatic pressure increase. In other words, temperature rises when the specimen is under the compressive state whereas temperature drops under the tensile state. 2) Pure shear deformation does not contribute to temperature variation. Namely, shape change of specimen does not produce temperature variation. However, there exist the relative tensile area and the compressive one in the specimen under the state of pure shear. Temperature drops within the relative tensile area while temperature rises within the compressive areas during the process of loading. stress-strain, temperature variation, volume strain, pure shear, sine-wave loadRecently, more and more thermal anomalies corresponding to earthquake and fault activity are investigated by using satellite remote sensing technology although many problems remain unsolved. Up to now, almost thermal infrared seismic precursors are found by rethinking of some phenomena, maybe related to seismic activity, after earthquake occurred. And it is lack of necessary analyses to physical mechanism on thermal infrared anomaly prior to earthquake, so that it does not judge the facticity and reliability of seismic precursor [1] . Relationship between thermal field and strain field during the process of fault deformation is the physical basis for applying the satellite infrared information or land surface temperature to analyze earthquake or fault activity. The temperature variation on rock deformation during the process of loading is studied through a series of experiments [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , which lays the foundation for further work, but these experimental results are not in accordance with one another, some of which are conflicted with the classical physical principle. For instance, some researchers suppose that relationship between temperature variation and stress state is related with rock category, which temperature rises in some rocks, keeps stable in some rocks, and drops in some rocks, under compression state.There are two major reasons for the aforementioned discordant experimental results: 1) limitation of the experimental technology. The temperature variation during the deformation of rock is minimal. Therefore, the valid temperature signal...