A TENTATIVE STUDY ON THE PATTERNING OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL ACTIVITIES FOLLOWING CONTROL OF SKIN TEMPERATURE

Abstract

As recently, a number of reports appeared suggesting finger and forehead skin temperature rises along the training to decrease frontalis EMG, the present research was undertaken with the purpose to examine whether control to rise finger skin temperature leads to some change on frontalis and forearm EMG activity as a reverse phenomenon. The present study used 4 subjects who undergone a preliminary day of adaptation followed by four days of traning to control skin temperature (increase). Simultaneous measurements of finger and forehead skin temperatures and EMG of the frontalis and forehand extensor muscles were taken on each day. The results are shown in Fig. 1 : 1) There was a decrease of finger temperature on the first day of adaptation, while an increase was observed during training from the second to the fourth day of the experiment. 2) Fig. 2 shows the covariation between each of the skin temperature and EMG placements; as it can be seen, the covariation between the finger skin temperature and forehand EMG is remarkably greater than for the other combinations regardless of the time mean used for analysis. 3) Fig. 3 shows the degree of correlation (positive/negative) between each of the skin temperature and EMG measurements. As it can be seen, the negative correlation between the finger skin temperature and forearm EMG is relatively larger than the positive one.