Fibrofeedback.com

Skin Conductance Level Experiments

“SCL stands for skin conductance level, which is basically sweat gland activity. The sensors send a small current of electricity across the surface of your skin and measure the resistance. As your hands get sweatier the resistance drops, and the reading increases. Or inversely, as sweat gland activity goes down, the resistance goes up, and the reading in the program goes down.”- Mister Noggin, Wild Divine Site Administrator.

“SCL measures sweat gland activity in the tip of your finger. Increased perspiration suggests increased Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activation, which may indicate associated excitement or anxiety or perhaps a little of both. A decrease in SCL generally represents a decline in ANS arousal and a sense of calming. For SCL, we do not want our fingertips too sweaty or too dry. Readings below around 1.5 uMhos are often considered dry, and above say 4.5 may be considered sweaty, depending on your age, climate, etc. However, these may be just where you want them to be if you are trying on purpose to raise or lower your ANS activation levels from their resting state for a biofeedback “Event” within The Journey.”—Wild Divine Grapher’s Manual.

 

An  excellent and informative discussion on the subject of "Skin Talk" can be found in the book, "New Mind, New Body", by Barbara B. Brown, Ph.D., copyright 1974.  Dr. Brown goes into great historical and technical detail about the language, meaning, and complexity of skin response.

S. Shyam Sundar, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, and Carson Wagner, assistant professor of advertising at the University of Texas, publish their findings in the current issue of the journal, Media Psychology. Their experiments try to establich a relationship between SCL and waiting for your computer to download...Now THAT can be frustrating!

http://www.psu.edu/ur/2002/downloadspeeds.html

“Skin conductance levels, a psychophysiological measure of the degree to which sweat glands get activated by calculating the level of electrical conductance through the skin, provide a common tool for communications researchers because the levels allow researchers to estimate people's arousal responses. SCLs measure only the intensity, not the nature or kind, of emotion and the increased levels noted in the experiments could be a result of either anticipation or frustration as a result of download speed. Still, while researchers could not differentiate between those emotions, they did show download speed affected how audience members related to the content that was transferred from the Web to their computers.”

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So, I have discovered that by rubbing my foot against a rug, I am able to reliably and repeatedly affect my SCL. This ability isn’t exactly a super power. It doesn’t fall into the same category as would mental telepathy, or telekinesis, but it is an ability that I never knew I had.

Learning how to control this effect led me to the following experiment.

Purpose: The purpose of this experiment was determine how I could best modulate the SCL.

Initial conditions:
Hardware: Wild Divine Iom biofeedback monitor
Instrumented right hand
Bare left foot on stiff Berber carpet

Intensity Modulation
The first thing I tried was to move my foot lightly over the rug at the frequency of the heart breath. This gave the following result.

 

As can be seen, my foot triggered a very rapid increase in SCL. Continued light stroking kept the level relatively constant.

I next tried heavy pressure on my foot, still stroking at the heart breath frequency. This seemed to “Max out” the effect about half way through the 6 minute interval.

I then relaxed my foot for six minutes. The graph shows a slow reduction in SCL.

 

 

I finally tried rapid, heavy strokes at a one second interval. This seemed to maintain the SCL level.