Affective State Recognition Using Thermal-Based Imaging: A Survey

The thermal-based imaging technique has recently attracted the attention of researchers who are interested in the recognition of human affects dueto its ability to measure the facial transient temperature, which is correlated withhuman affects and robustness against illumination changes. Therefore, studieshave increasingly used the thermal imaging as a potential and supplemental solution to overcome the challenges of visual (RGB) imaging, such as the variation oflight conditions and revealing original human affect. Moreover, the thermal-basedimaging has shown promising results in the detection of psychophysiological signals, such as pulse rate and respiration rate in a contactless and noninvasive way.This paper presents a brief review on human affects and focuses on the advantages and challenges of the thermal imaging technique. In addition, this paper discusses the stages of thermal-based human affective state recognition, such asdataset type, preprocessing stage, region of interest (ROI), feature descriptors,and classification approaches with a brief performance analysis based on a number of works in the literature. This analysis could help beginners in the thermalimaging and affective recognition domain to explore numerous approaches usedby researchers to construct an affective state system based on thermal imaging.

The FDA Mandate to Reassess Benzodiazepines: Alprazolam Induces a Positive Conditioned Place-Preference in Male Rats

On September 23, 2020, in order “To address the serious risks of abuse, addiction, physical dependence, and withdrawal reactions, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requiring the Boxed Warning be updated for all benzodiazepine medicines”. With this announcement, the FDA proclaimed that much more needs to be known about the initiation, continuation, and discontinuation of these widely-used drugs. Unfortunately, relevant information is lacking, since for many years, there has been a notable sparsity in the funding and conduct of basic and clinical research on these drugs. In order to begin to fill the void, it is valuable to (re)examine animal models. We here describe a model of conditioned place-preference (CPP) for rats and for the first time, to our knowledge, show that the representative benzodiazepine alprazolam induces positive place-preference in male rats.

Cerebral processing of emotions in phantom eye pain patients:An event related potential study

Purpose Phantom eye pain(PEP)is a major clinical problem after eye removal with no standard treatment protocol to date.As pain is a multidimensional experience associated with emotional and cognitive components,this study aimed to explore the possible neuropsychological mechanisms of PEP in a perspective of emotional cognition,in order to provide a basis for clinical treatment.Methods Visual oddball event-related potentials(ERPs)under different external emotional stimuli(Disgust,Fear,Sadness,Happiness,Erotica and Neutral)were tested in 12 patients and 12 healthy volunteers.Participants'affective states were measured with the Mood Disorder Questionnaire(MDQ),the Hypomania Checklist-32(HCL-32),and the Plutchik–van Praag Depression Inventory(PVP).The amplitudes and latencies of N1,P2,N2 and P3 components were analyzed by three-way ANOVA,i.e.,group(2)×emotion(6)×electrode(3).Multiple comparisons were performed using Bonferroni's test.Results Longer N1 latencies,increased N1 amplitudes;shorter P2 latencies under Disgust and Happiness,decreased P2 amplitudes;shorter N2 latencies under Erotica,increased N2 amplitudes were found in patients compared with controls.There was no main effect of group or interaction effect on P3 latencies and P3 amplitudes.The MDQ and HCL-32 scores were lower,and the N1 latencies under Sadness were negatively correlated with PVP scores in patients.Conclusions PEP patients showed reversed patterns in exogenous attention allocation and enhanced involuntary attention to emotional stimuli compared with controls.This study demonstrated cortical processing of emotions in PEP patients and could provide a basis for developing emotional intervention therapy.