Periodic Reporting for period 3 - POTION (Promoting social interaction through emotional body odours)
Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2022-12-31
POTION project investigates on the nature of human chemosignals (i.e. body odours) and how they influence human communication and behaviour aiming at developing future technologies to foster social interaction.
POTION will provide a new dimension to the multifaceted world of human sociality and will let us better understand how we chemically interact with other people. We will study two specific emotions such as happiness and fear that have been identified as the basis of driving the human social strategy. The POTION project will unveil the chemical compound of fear and happy chemosignals and how they influence vigilant or collaborative and creative behaviours in crowd situations. Furthermore, artificial happy and fear compounds will be produced to induce the same individual and group behaviours that human body odours induce. These will be employed to empower the long-lost interpersonal interaction in social media networking and to propose novel diagnosis and therapy for people suffering from social impairment disease or depression.
Thus, the overall objective of POTION will branch into several scientific, technological and social objectives: the identification of the chemical nature of the human chemosignals in human sweat and their role in social interaction; the artificial production or synthesis of the human chemosignals; the development of computational models that will explain the effects of the chemosignals on human brain, behaviour, and olfactory perception; the discovering of new clinical knowledge in the assessment, severity evaluation and clinical treatment of mental disorders; the development of an autonomous multisensory and multiuser virtual reality setup for olfactory-driven social interaction.
All of these will lead to the final development of an innovative futuristic technological paradigm that will be able to drive and enhance social interaction delivering human chemosignals of fear and happiness according to the emotional and social state of a subject/patient: the closed-loop Potion Delivery System (PDS).
POTION will provide a new dimension to the multifaceted world of human sociality and will let us better understand how we chemically interact with other people. We will study two specific emotions such as happiness and fear that have been identified as the basis of driving the human social strategy. The POTION project will unveil the chemical compound of fear and happy chemosignals and how they influence vigilant or collaborative and creative behaviours in crowd situations. Furthermore, artificial happy and fear compounds will be produced to induce the same individual and group behaviours that human body odours induce. These will be employed to empower the long-lost interpersonal interaction in social media networking and to propose novel diagnosis and therapy for people suffering from social impairment disease or depression.
Thus, the overall objective of POTION will branch into several scientific, technological and social objectives: the identification of the chemical nature of the human chemosignals in human sweat and their role in social interaction; the artificial production or synthesis of the human chemosignals; the development of computational models that will explain the effects of the chemosignals on human brain, behaviour, and olfactory perception; the discovering of new clinical knowledge in the assessment, severity evaluation and clinical treatment of mental disorders; the development of an autonomous multisensory and multiuser virtual reality setup for olfactory-driven social interaction.
All of these will lead to the final development of an innovative futuristic technological paradigm that will be able to drive and enhance social interaction delivering human chemosignals of fear and happiness according to the emotional and social state of a subject/patient: the closed-loop Potion Delivery System (PDS).
In the first half of the project, the research has been hampered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite this, the consortium was able to reorganize the project plan to carry out many activities and achieved several results. The first phase of the sweat pad collection was successfully concluded. Some of the pads have been employed in the experimental setting while others have been analyzed in the chemical laboratory. The remaining sweat donors to be recruited will be acquired following a new experimental setup that has been conceived to facilitate the chemical analysis. In this context, different approaches and procedures were tested to develop chemical methods allowing the collection, analysis, and identification of the largest possible number of compounds (in terms of chemical class, volatility, and polarity) released from the skin and sweat of volunteers undergoing emotional stimulation. These chemical analytic methods were applied to the sweat pads collected during a VR experiment able to induce a more intense stimulus compared to video sequences. Preliminary sweat volatiles that are differentially produced in response to fear stimuli have been identified.
Novel VR environments have been used also to design experiments for the characterization of the neural response to different social-emotional contexts during exposition to fear and happiness chemosignal. We collected several behavioural and physiological data and proposed the first version of both the dynamic causal model (DCM) to estimate a model that illustrates how emotions change brain states and the Bayesian social interaction model (BSIM), i.e. a model that quantifies how emotions alter behavioural or physiological body responses and consequently social interactions. This latter will be also the model that will drive the PDS in a closed-loop fashion. A first prototype of the PDS and of a new wearable monitoring platform have been developed and it will be tested in the next phase taking advantage of the reopening of the laboratories. The rules that need to be followed for such technological development and usage have been studied to achieve a first definition of the ethical and legal requirements to be implemented in the general setting of the technology
Furthermore, also the activities with the clinical partners have been entered the experimental phase after the protocol definition of two pilot studies in the initial stage of the project. Two pre-studies have been started focusing on two questions: (1) if and how odours can support the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, such as social anxiety and depression, through differential physiological reactions to these stimuli and (2) whether the odours from pads or the PDS may be utilized to support positive outcomes of psychological treatment of these two disorders. Some interesting preliminary results are under investigation and will be deepened in the following periods.
The aforementioned activities have been carried out following the ethical guidelines established by the law experts within the consortium in agreement with the EU policies. Moreover, we acted at several stages to guarantee effective management of the project and effective dissemination and exploitation of the innovation arising from the POTION project.
Novel VR environments have been used also to design experiments for the characterization of the neural response to different social-emotional contexts during exposition to fear and happiness chemosignal. We collected several behavioural and physiological data and proposed the first version of both the dynamic causal model (DCM) to estimate a model that illustrates how emotions change brain states and the Bayesian social interaction model (BSIM), i.e. a model that quantifies how emotions alter behavioural or physiological body responses and consequently social interactions. This latter will be also the model that will drive the PDS in a closed-loop fashion. A first prototype of the PDS and of a new wearable monitoring platform have been developed and it will be tested in the next phase taking advantage of the reopening of the laboratories. The rules that need to be followed for such technological development and usage have been studied to achieve a first definition of the ethical and legal requirements to be implemented in the general setting of the technology
Furthermore, also the activities with the clinical partners have been entered the experimental phase after the protocol definition of two pilot studies in the initial stage of the project. Two pre-studies have been started focusing on two questions: (1) if and how odours can support the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, such as social anxiety and depression, through differential physiological reactions to these stimuli and (2) whether the odours from pads or the PDS may be utilized to support positive outcomes of psychological treatment of these two disorders. Some interesting preliminary results are under investigation and will be deepened in the following periods.
The aforementioned activities have been carried out following the ethical guidelines established by the law experts within the consortium in agreement with the EU policies. Moreover, we acted at several stages to guarantee effective management of the project and effective dissemination and exploitation of the innovation arising from the POTION project.
The activity of the first half of the project laid solid foundations for future chemical analysis, experimental design, clinical studies and computation model development. Indeed, we believe to have remarkably improved the procedures reported in the literature concerning the analysis of volatiles emitted from the skin and sweat, allowing the detection at an unprecedentedly low concentration level. Even though the identification of chemicals is still ongoing, hundreds of new chemicals never observed in the human volatilome have been identified that will help to shed new light on the composition of human chemosignals. Moreover, thanks to novel and improved experimental design in VR able to integrate multiple sensors and the odour stimulation, and the innovative DCM and BSIM models, we found important results about the effective connection of key brain regions involved in chemosignal perception and how chemosignals change brain states. Also in the clinical scenario, we achieved very interesting preliminary results that appear to point towards an increased reduction of anxiety symptoms when treatment is administered in combination with odour exposure in comparison with control.
These experimental results together with the innovative technology designed for odour delivery and psychophysiological data monitoring and analysis, pave the path for future important findings, which will always be accompanied by the definition of novel ethical requirements e di new business models.
These experimental results together with the innovative technology designed for odour delivery and psychophysiological data monitoring and analysis, pave the path for future important findings, which will always be accompanied by the definition of novel ethical requirements e di new business models.