The thermal dimension of psychophysiological and emotional responses revealed by thermal infrared imaging

Interpersonal communication and relationships rely on the continuous assessment of the psychophysiological state of the interlocutor. The thermal infrared imaging has been demonstrated to be a reliable tool for the non-invasive contactless evaluation of vital signs, psychophysiological responses and emotional states. The use of this technique is quickly spreading in many fields, from social and developmental psychology to the psychometrics; or from the continuous monitoring of vital signs and stress up to the human-machine interaction. The state of the art of thermal infrared imaging in psychophysiology and in the assessment of emotional states is discussed to provide insights about its potentialities and limits, with special emphasis to the still open issues for image processing and real-time data analysis.

[1]  Arcangelo Merla,et al.  Revealing Psychophysiology and Emotions through Thermal Infrared Imaging , 2016, PhyCS.

[2]  I. Fujimas,et al.  Pathophysiological expression and analysis of far infrared thermal images , 1998 .

[3]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[4]  John B. Shoven,et al.  I , Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal.

[5]  I. Pavlidis,et al.  Noncontact measurement of breathing function , 2006, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine.

[6]  A. Merla.  Computationa physiology in a thermal image setting , 2007 .

[7]  Ioannis Pavlidis,et al.  Thermal infrared imaging: a novel method to monitor airflow during polysomnography. , 2009, Sleep.

[8]  Amanda C. Hahn,et al.  Hot or not? Thermal reactions to social contact , 2012, Biology Letters.

[9]  A. Merla,et al.  Thermal Signatures of Emotional Arousal: A Functional Infrared Imaging Study , 2007, 2007 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

[10]  Marc Garbey,et al.  Imaging the cardiovascular pulse , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).

[11]  A. Merla,et al.  Mom feels what her child feels: thermal signatures of vicarious autonomic response while watching children in a stressful situation , 2013, Front. Hum. Neurosci..

[12]  N. Kobayashi,et al.  First selective attachment begins in early infancy: A study using telethermography☆ , 1990 .

[13]  Tom Chau,et al.  Classifying Affective States Using Thermal Infrared Imaging of the Human Face , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[14]  Marc Georges,et al.  Review of thermal imaging systems in composite defect detection , 2013 .

[15]  Marc Garbey,et al.  Contact-Free Measurement of Cardiac Pulse Based on the Analysis of Thermal Imagery , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[16]  Ioannis T. Pavlidis,et al.  Coalitional Tracking in Facial Infrared Imaging and Beyond , 2006, 2006 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW'06).

[17]  Marc Garbey,et al.  Interacting with human physiology , 2007, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[18]  Yan Zhou,et al.  Tissue Tracking in Thermo-physiological Imagery through Spatio-temporal Smoothing , 2009, MICCAI.

[19]  Gregory F. Lewis,et al.  A novel method for extracting respiration rate and relative tidal volume from infrared thermography. , 2011, Psychophysiology.

[20]  Vittorio Gallese,et al.  The Autonomic Signature of Guilt in Children: A Thermal Infrared Imaging Study , 2013, PloS one.

[21]  A. Merla,et al.  Mother and child in synchrony: Thermal facial imprints of autonomic contagion , 2012, Biological Psychology.

[22]  Dvijesh Shastri,et al.  Imaging Facial Physiology for the Detection of Deceit , 2006, International Journal of Computer Vision.