Effect of Emotional Stress on Finger Temperature

The role of the peripheral circulatory system in reflecting emotional conditions has long been recognized from casual observation. Affective states have their physiological concomitants which are mediated by the autonomic nervous system and appear as variations in rate and volume of blood flow in arterioles and minute vessels in the skin. Mittelmann and Wolff ( 2 ) , in a study of finger temperature changes during psychoanalytic interviews, have observed that rapid variations occur which appear to correlate with obscurely defined emotional feeling tones. The present experiment was designed to determine the effect on finger temperature of two brief role-playing situations which had been demonstrated previously by Bovard ( 1 ) and Paul ( 3 ) to produce strong positive and negative feelings in S toward E.