Nerve growth factor (NGF) plays a biologic role in the development and maintenance of sympathetic and small sensory neurons. Because it facilitates nerve fiber regeneration, lowers heat-pain threshold (hyperalgesia), and prevents or improves nerve dysfunction in experimental neuropathy, it is being considered as a putative treatment for certain human polyneuropathies. In 16 healthy subjects, we tested whether intradermal injection of minute doses of recombinant human NGF (1 or 3 micrograms) compared with saline induces hyperalgesia or alters cutaneous sensation (at the site of injection) as measured by symptom scores, clinical examination, or quantitative sensory testing with Computer Assisted Sensory Examination (CASE IV). Most subjects had, as their only symptom, localized tenderness of the NGF-injected site and only when the site was bumped or compressed. Slight discomfort developed in volar wrist structures (with flexion of fingers) or tenderness of deep structures to palpation over the bicipital groove or supraclavicular region. The Neuropathy Symptoms and Change questionnaire indicated that pressure allodynia was significantly localized to the NGF-injected side from 3 hours to 21 days after injections. Light stroking of the skin did not induce tactile allodynia. Compression of injected sites induced pressure allodynia that occurred more frequently and significantly on the NGF-injected side after 3 hours and was maintained for several weeks. No abnormality of vibratory or cooling detection threshold developed from NGF injection. By contrast, heat-pain threshold (HP 0.5, p = 0.003) and an intermediate level of heat-pain (HP 5.0, p < 0.001) were significantly lowered 1, 3, and 7 days (and in some cases at 3 hours and 14 and 21 days) after NGF injection. The time course of pressure allodynia and heat-pain hyperalgesia is too rapid to be explained by uptake of NGF by nociception terminals, retrograde transport, and upregulation of pain modulators. Local tissue mechanisms appear to be implicated. It remains to be tested whether recombinant human NGF prevents, stabilizes, or ameliorates small fiber human neuropathies.

Direct gaze and interpersonal proximity are known to lead to changes in psycho-physiology, behavior and brain function. We know little, however, about subtler facial reactions such as rise and fall in temperature, which may be sensitive to contextual effects and functional in social interactions. Using thermal infrared imaging cameras 18 female adult participants were filmed at two interpersonal distances (intimate and social) and two gaze conditions (averted and direct). The order of variation in distance was counterbalanced: half the participants experienced a female experimenter's gaze at the social distance first before the intimate distance (a socially “normal” order) and half experienced the intimate distance first and then the social distance (an odd social order). At both distances averted gaze always preceded direct gaze. We found strong correlations in thermal changes between six areas of the face (forehead, chin, cheeks, nose, maxilliary, and periorbital regions) for all experimental conditions and developed a composite measure of thermal shifts for all analyses. Interpersonal proximity led to a thermal rise, but only in the “normal” social order. Direct gaze, compared to averted gaze, led to a thermal increase at both distances with a stronger effect at intimate distance, in both orders of distance variation. Participants reported direct gaze as more intrusive than averted gaze, especially at the intimate distance. These results demonstrate the powerful effects of another person's gaze on psycho-physiological responses, even at a distance and independent of context.

Sympathy crying is an odd and complex mixture of physiological and emotional phenomena. Standard psychophysiological theories of emotion cannot attribute crying to a single subdivision of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and disagreement exists regarding the emotional origin of sympathy crying. The current experiment examines sympathy crying using functional thermal infrared imaging (FTII), a novel contactless measure of ANS activity. To induce crying female participants were given the choice to decide which film they wanted to cry to. Compared to baseline, temperature started increasing on the forehead, the peri-orbital region, the cheeks and the chin before crying and reached even higher temperatures during crying. The maxillary area showed the opposite pattern and a gradual temperature decrease was observed compared to baseline as a result of emotional sweating. The results suggest that tears of sympathy are part of a complex autonomic interaction between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems, with the latter preceding the former. The emotional origin of the phenomenon seems to derive from subjective internal factors that relate to one’s personal experiences and attributes with tears arising in the form of catharses or as part of shared sadness.

So far blushing has been examined in the context of a negative rather than a positive reinforcement where visual displays of a blush were based on subjective measures. The current study used infrared imaging to measure thermal patterns of the face while with the use of a video camera quantified on the visible spectrum alterations in skin color related to a compliment. To elicit a blush a three-phase dialog was adopted ending or starting with a compliment on a female sample (N = 22). When the dialog ended with a compliment results showed a linear increase in temperature for the cheek, and forehead whereas for the peri-orbital region a linear decrease was observed. The compliment phase marked the highest temperature on the chin independent of whether or not the experiment started with a compliment contrary to other facial regions, which did not show a significant change when the experiment started with a compliment. Analyses on the visible spectrum showed that skin pigmentation was getting deep red in the compliment condition compared to the serious and social dialog conditions for both the forehead and the cheeks. No significant association was observed between temperature values and erythrocyte displays on the forehead and cheek. Heat is the physiological product of an arousing social scenario, however, preconceived notions about blushing propensity seem to drive erythrocyte displays and not necessarily conscious awareness of somatic sensations.

This study aimed to (1) investigate the variation in self ascription to gender roles and attitudes toward gender roles across countries and its associations with crying behaviors, emotion change, and beliefs about crying and (2) understand how the presence of others affects our evaluations of emotion following crying. This was a large international survey design study (N = 893) conducted in Australia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Analyses revealed that, across countries, gender, self-ascribed gender roles, and gender role attitudes (GRA) were related to behavioral crying responses, but not related to emotion change following crying. How a person evaluates crying, instead, appeared to be highly related to one’s beliefs about the helpfulness of crying, irrespective of gender. Results regarding crying when others were present showed that people are more likely both to cry and to feel that they received help around a person that they know, compared to a stranger. Furthermore, closeness to persons present during crying did not affect whether help was provided. When a crier reported that they were helped, they also tended to report feeling better following crying than those who cried around others but did not receive help. Few cross-country differences emerged, suggesting that a person’s responses to crying are quite consistent among the countries investigated here, with regard to its relationship with a person’s gender role, crying beliefs, and reactions to the presence of others.

The ability to automatically assess emotional responses via contact-free video recording taps into a rapidly growing market aimed at predicting consumer choices. If consumer attention and engagement are measurable in a reliable and accessible manner, relevant marketing decisions could be informed by objective data. Although significant advances have been made in automatic affect recognition, several practical and theoretical issues remain largely unresolved. These concern the lack of cross-system validation, a historical emphasis of posed over spontaneous expressions, as well as more fundamental issues regarding the weak association between subjective experience and facial expressions. To address these limitations, the present paper argues that extant commercial and free facial expression classifiers should be rigorously validated in cross-system research. Furthermore, academics and practitioners must better leverage fine-grained emotional response dynamics, with stronger emphasis on understanding naturally occurring spontaneous expressions, and in naturalistic choice settings. We posit that applied consumer research might be better situated to examine facial behavior in socio-emotional contexts rather than decontextualized, laboratory studies, and highlight how AHAA can be successfully employed in this context. Also, facial activity should be considered less as a single outcome variable, and more as a starting point for further analyses. Implications of this approach and potential obstacles that need to be overcome are discussed within the context of consumer research.

The vast majority of research on human emotional tears has relied on posed and static stimulus materials. In this paper, we introduce the Portsmouth Dynamic Spontaneous Tears Database (PDSTD), a free resource comprising video recordings of 24 female encoders depicting a balanced representation of sadness stimuli with and without tears. Encoders watched a neutral film and a self-selected sad film and reported their emotional experience for 9 emotions. Extending this initial validation, we obtained norming data from an independent sample of naïve observers (N = 91, 45 females) who watched videos of the encoders during three time phases (neutral, pre-sadness, sadness), yielding a total of 72 validated recordings. Observers rated the expressions during each phase on 7 discrete emotions, negative and positive valence, arousal, and genuineness. All data were analyzed by means of general linear mixed modelling (GLMM) to account for sources of random variance. Our results confirm the successful elicitation of sadness, and demonstrate the presence of a tear effect, i.e., a substantial increase in perceived sadness for spontaneous dynamic weeping. To our knowledge, the PDSTD is the first database of spontaneously elicited dynamic tears and sadness that is openly available to researchers. The stimuli can be accessed free of charge via OSF from https://osf.io/uyjeg/?view_only=24474ec8d75949ccb9a8243651db0abf.

Physiological adaptations to external stressors can reveal socio-cognitive health in infancy. With the use of thermal imaging and behavioural analyses, the current study examined the arousal markers accompanying infants' interactions with a familiar and an unfamiliar person. To address the current research question, the mother and a complete stranger interacted with 2 to 3 month-old infants (N= 10, 2 boys)in three different conditions: Neutral, Play, and Compliment. Behavioral analyses showed that overall gaze was longer to the Stranger compared to the Mother independent of condition. Physiological findings showed that skin temperature was significantly higher with the stranger independent of condition. The regions of the face that passed the significance threshold included the maxillary area, the nose, and the forehead. Both behavioral and physiological findings emphasize the ability of the infant to distinguish between a familiar and an unfamiliar person. Most importantly, however thermal imaging has proven to be a promising tool in physiologically differentiating between variable social conditions in very young infants opening up a new experimental portal for identifying healthy physiological development. How to cite this article: Ioannou S, Morris P, Hassanain H, et al. Under the skin: Exploring 2-month-olds' thermal reactions in different social interactions with mother and stranger.