Thermal signatures of human pheromones in sexual and reproductive behaviour

Chemically mediated sexual communication in humans has been largely neglected due to its non-conscious and relatively concealed nature. However, menstrual cycle synchronisation, puberty onset in young pre-pubertal girls exposed to their stepfather, and consanguinity avoidance suggest a function in the physiological regulation of sexual and reproductive behaviour in humans. These phenomena are related to activation of the limbic system by pheromones. On the basis of sexually dimorphic activation of brain hypothalamic areas and the control of body temperature via the hypothalamus, our hypothesis is that human sexual pheromones can induce thermal effects that can be revealed by high-resolution thermal infrared imaging. Here we show that in women, male sexual pheromones induce thermal effects that are linked to the ovarian cycle. These findings suggest a dramatic influence of pheromones on human sexual and reproductive behaviour through neuroendocrine brain control, established on the plesiomorphic nature of chemical communication across species

Development of Technologies and Test Formats for Credibility Assessment

From introduction: "Because Credibility Assessment is a relatively new and developing field there are different ways of describing it and what it encompasses. For ihe purposes of this paper Credibility Assessment is defined as the process of determining the reliability and validity of information, regardless of source. "(...

Using functional infrared thermal imaging to measure stress responses

The stress response reflects a coordinated pattern of physiological changes that serves the adaptive function of increasing an organism’s ability to cope with situations that require action or defense. The changes in blood flow associated with the stress response may be detectable using the relatively new research technique of functional infrared thermal imaging (fITI). The present study was designed to determine the time-course and topography of temperature changes in human faces during the experience of a stressor. Infrared images were taken from 29 female participants while they completed the mental arithmetic component of the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Continuously self-reported stress levels confirmed that this task caused a significant increase in stress levels. Skin temperature was measured from 5 facial regions of interest (ROIs: forehead, periorbital, nasal, cheeks, and perioral). Stress caused a significant increase in the forehead and cheek regions, and a significant decrease in the perioral region. These results demonstrated that stress is detectable from facial skin using thermography. However, the ability of this technique to distinguish between different affective states (e.g., stress vs embarrassment) remains to be determined. As such, more research is needed before fITI is deemed a reliable tool for measuring affective states in real-world settings such as airports

Remote sensing of strong emotions using electro-optical imaging technique

©Cranfield UniversityThis thesis reports a summary of the PhD programme for the assessment of person‘s emotional anxiety using Electro-optical technology. The thesis focuses mainly on the understanding of fundamental properties of physiological responses to emotional anxiety and how they can be captured by using Electro-optical (EO) imaging methods such as hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and thermal imaging (TI) techniques. The thesis summarises three main areas of work that have been undertaken by the author in the programme: (a) Experimental set up including HSI system and data acquisition software design and implementation, (b) fundamental understanding of physiological responses to emotional anxiety from the EO perspective and (c) the development of a novel remote sensing technique for the assessment of emotions without the requirement of base line information. One of our main results is to provide evidence to prove that the mean temperature in the periorbital region remains the same within 0.2°C during emotional anxiety. Furthermore, we have shown that it is the high temperature pixels within the periorbital, which increases in numbers by a huge amount after 2 minutes of the onset of anxiety. We have also developed techniques to allow the assessment anxiety without the need of base line information. The method has been tested using a sample size of about 40 subjects, and achieved promising result. Technologies for the remote sensing of heart beat rate has been in great demand, this study also involves the development of heart beat detection using TI system. Moreover, we have also attempted for the first time to sense glucose concentration from the blood sample in-vivo using HSI technique remotely

Analysis Of Feature Reduction Algorithms To Estimate Human Stress Conditions

Stress is a normal reaction of the human organism which triggered in situations that require a certain level of activation. This reaction has both positive and negative effects on everyone’s life. Thermal-based imaging has shown promising results in detecting stress in a non-contact and non-invasive manner. Therefore, this study aimed to present analyse of the performance of feature classify when combining with feature selection algorithm to estimate human stress based on the facial feature of thermal imaging. Three hybrid classifiers, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT) and Logistic Regression (LR) combined with feature reduction analysis, Principal Component Analyse (PCA) and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was evaluated with 10-fold validation to compute classification accuracy. Four statistical features was extracted; mean, maximum, minimum and standard deviation of the gray scale value from six area regions of interest. Results showing that hybrid classifier DT-ANOVA achieves higher accuracy of 62% compared to others 90 combination classifiers. The findings demonstrated that DT-ANOVA performs well with a small dataset, while SVM and LR can improve the accuracy when fused with ANOVA for a big dataset. The findings also suggested that ANOVA can provides comparable performance as PCA