The blushing brain: What makes our cheeks go red?

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-07-17 09:01

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If you ever worry about your blushing cheeks giving your thoughts away, Dutch and Italian researchers suggest that the reddening and warmth of our cheeks might come about from activating areas of our brain involved in emotional arousal, and likely occurs independently of our thoughts. The team stuck 40 teens in an MRI scanner and made them watch pre-recorded videos of themselves and other people singing karaoke while their cheek temperatures and brain activity were measured. The participants tended to blush more when watching themselves sing, compared to watching others, and this blushing was related to a higher activation of specific areas of the brain involved in emotional arousal.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

The Blushing Brain: Neural Substrates of Cheek Temperature Increase in Response to Self-Observation

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Darwin proposed that blushing—the reddening of the face due to heightened self-awareness—is “the most human of all expressions”. Yet, relatively little is known about the underlying mechanisms of blushing. Is blushing a rapid, spontaneous emotional response, or does it result from mentalizing—thinking about what others think of us? To investigate the neural activity associated with blushing, 16-20-year-old participants watched pre-recorded videos of themselves (compared to other people as a control condition) singing karaoke while in an MRI scanner. We measured participants’ increase in cheek temperature, an indicator of blushing, along with their brain activity. Participants blushed more when watching themselves sing compared to watching others. This increased blushing was related to higher activation in the cerebellum and the left paracentral lobe and more time-locked processing of the videos in the early visual cortices. These findings show that blushing is linked to the activation of brain areas involved in emotional arousal, suggesting that it may occur independently of mentalizing.

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Funder: This work was supported by the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Talent grant to M.N. and D.S. The writing of this article was supported by the Gain Time to Think fellowship of the College of Life Sciences of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin to M.N. M.N. was funded by the Dutch Research Council VENI grant 201G.017, C.K. by the Dutch Research Council VICI grant 453-15-009 and V.G. by the Dutch Research Council VIDI grant 452-14-015.

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