Although "Pinocchio" is a children's novel, Spanish scientists from the University of Granada have recently discovered what they have called the "Pinocchio effect", after discovering that the nose changes when we tell a lie, writes delmondo.it.
Researcher Emilio Gomez and his team developed a test that uses thermography to show if people are lying, and found that each time participants lied, the tip of the nose temperature dropped to 1.2 degrees Celsius, while the forehead temperature rose by 1, 5 degrees.
The researcher also found that the drop in temperature at the level of the nose also leads to a slight reduction in size, although the change is not discernible to the naked eye.
"Lying raises the temperature of the forehead and the anxiety you are lying lowers the temperature of your nose," Gomez explained.
To conduct the study, the scientists asked 60 students to make a three- to four-minute phone call with your parents, partners, or friends, and to invent a somewhat plausible lie.
Participants had to invent lies during phone calls, and thermal imaging cameras revealed this "Pinocchio reverse effect" caused by temperature changes in the nose and forehead.
Interestingly, the thermal lie detector detected the temperature change in 80 per cent of the test subjects.
"With this method we have achieved the goal of increasing accuracy and reducing the occurrence of false results, which is common with other methods such as polygraph," said Gomez.