“A person’s mood is tied to their cognition and general brain function,” said Owen Griffith, assistant teaching professor of kinesiology at Penn State and co-author of the study. “In this study, results suggested that people enjoy the sensation of head cooling. This, in turn, improved their mood, which altered their brain activity.”
The researchers recruited 24 college students between the ages of 18 and 26. At the beginning of the study, all participants completed questionnaires that measured their mental health and cognitive abilities and underwent an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity.
Following the EEG, participants spent 30 minutes sitting in a dimly lit room listening to ocean sounds. Half of participants wore a fitted cooling cap, which uses liquid circulating close to the head to maintain a temperature of 33 degrees Fahrenheit. The other participants wore nothing on their heads. Immediately after the cooling or sitting session, participants repeated the questionnaires and EEG.
Participants repeated the same sitting or cooling session without testing every day for one week. The day after the last session, participants repeated the questionnaires and EEG again. This design allowed the researchers to observe both the short- and longer-term effects of head cooling.
“The brain produces different types of waves that are associated with different levels of excitement or brain activation,” said Laura Cooney, co-author of the study who graduated from Penn State’s Schreyer Honor College in 2025 and based her undergraduate thesis on the research. “Alpha waves are associated with calmness. More specifically, they are indicative of less brain activity overall, so this finding suggests that there was an immediate calming effect of head cooling.”
People in the head cooling group displayed an increase in alpha brain waves during the EEG immediately following the first cooling session. They experienced a 4% increase in alpha waves while participants whose heads were not cooled displayed a .5% decrease in alpha waves.
In contrast, there was no significant difference in the alpha wave levels of the sitting and cooling groups when measured on the day after the final cooling session, suggesting cooling does not have a longer-term impact on brain wave activity, the researchers said.
Over the course of the week, both groups of participants reported a decrease in depression symptoms, but individuals in the head cooling group reported a larger decrease than those in the sitting group.