There
is an old saying that ‘horses sweat, men perspire but ladies only glow’ and
then the term ‘she’s hot’ takes on an entirely different significance. But
perception is all. Now Amanda Hahn and her team have used their thermal imaging
kit on a total of 39 young ladies to see if they are really hot (1).
When
and how exactly, I hear you ask. In the first experiment 16 young ladies were
interviewed by two experimenters, one was female and the other wasn’t. Skin
temperatures were monitored. When the man was talking to them, their palms and
outer arm were distinctly cool. But their face and chest gave them away with a
significant temperature hike.
The
measurements were repeated with another group of young women, who were also questioned
about what they felt when chatting to their male interviewer. Their assessment
of stress, discomfort, excitement, embarrassment, etc. were all recorded and compared
to their telltale facial temperature changes, but no correlation was found as
the women got hotter without realizing it when the young men started
interacting with them.
So
it seems that talking to young men gets young women hot and bothered and the
authors conclude that measuring skin temperature is a good measure of the mating
signals being displayed.
As
most young men don’t carry thermal imaging kit about their person, they will
have to rely on the age-old hit or miss techniques to decide if she is hot or
what.
- http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/05/29/rsbl.2012.0338.full
