Infrared thermal imaging in affective neuroscience: insights to the self from the peripheral nervous system.

Changes in peripheral physiology lay in the unconscious and occur as a response to external challenges, whether is to fight a virus (e.g. fever) a predator (e.g Fight or Flight) or even to face a social challenge. Autonomic adaptation carries its own physiological print and by harnessing the power given by homeostatic balance, distinctions can be made between arousal and parasympathetic restoration. Conventional physiological methods restrict the way in which experimental designs can be performed. Functional Infrared Thermal Imaging (fITI) provides an alternative for physiological monitoring that enables experimental paradigms that resemble real life situations. With the use of thermal imaging the following studies were set to examine self-conscious emotions in a naturalistic experimental setting while advancing methodologically the technique of fITI. In the following chapters the potentialities and limits of fITI are illustrated (Chapter 2) and three studies are presented where fITI has been applied to investigate the autonomic signature of guilt in children (Chapter 3); the facial imprints of autonomic contagion in mother and child (Chapter 4); the role of social proximity and gaze in modulating facial temperature (Chapter 5). FITI has managed to reliably and systematically collect physiological thermal changes between affective states illustrating a new pathway for contact-free autonomic monitoring in the arena of self-conscious emotions.