Being touched by a man really gets the ladies hot, new research suggests. When physically touched by a male experimenter, women actually did get “hot and bothered” — their skin temperature increased, specifically in the face and chest. …

These changes were subconscious in many of the participants. Figuring out how skin temperature changes in response to stress and other emotional factors could help researchers study arousal non-invasively and develop hands-off lie detectors. …

This increase is pretty large for a facial temperature change, the researchers said. “This is the sort of magnitude of change you would see when you are doing an explicit emotional stressor,” like inducing fear or stress, Hahn said. “We weren’t manipulating their emotional or affective state, it was a subtle social interaction with the experimenter … but they had pretty large reactions.”