Science: Hot Stuff

After every afternoon movie she saw, for two years, a teen-age acquaintance of Chicago Physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman took her own temperature. A girl in her 20s took similar readings after 29 shows in two months.

In Science Dr. Kleitman reports that a movie raised the teen-ager’s temperature one degree above her usual temperature at the same hour (once she topped 100°). The older girl usually heated up half a degree; when she saw a double feature, the rise was less. (Possible explanation: temperature ordinarily falls as evening advances.)

Dr. Kleitman, an expert on human body temperature who once lived in a cave to prove that habits can change body heat’s diurnal rhythm (TIME, July 18, 1938), concludes: “On the basis of occasional data … on many subjects . . . and through an analysis of multiple readings on two … it appears that attending motion picture shows . . . is by no means relaxation in the physiological sense. . . . It remains to be seen whether the collective change in the body temperature of a preview audience can be used to predict the box-office success of a film.”