PhD I.S. Kozhevnikova¹
PhD, Associate Professor M.N. Pankov¹
PhD, Associate Professor L.F. Startseva^2
1Northern (Arctic) Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov, Arkhangelsk
²State Institute of Drugs and Good Practices, Moscow

Sports activity can be considered as an extreme load for the body that uses not only physical, but also mental and emotional reserves of an athlete.
Modern sports with their extreme stressors are highly demanding for the individual physical fitness and mental and emotional controls and resources, with the high accomplishments secured only when the individual physical and mental resources are fully mobilized.
Many study reports have showed the sport performance being dependent on the mental and emotional control of the athletes; and this is the reason why the mental and emotional control tests (subjective and instrumental ones) are given a high priority nowadays, with the modern digital infrared thermography technology is ranked among the most promising ones.
Sampled for the study were the 19-26 year old (n=21) athletes with the 3+ year sport records. They were tested by the infrared thermography in the positive and negative emotional states, with the test data being subject to statistical analysis using halftone adjacency matrices.
The tests rated the following individual parameters: average color intensity; standard deviation; average brightness; kurtosis and asymmetry ratios; energy and entropy; and the contrast and homogeneity.
Statistical analysis of the test data was used to produce nose-area images characteristic of the positive and negative individual emotional states in the sample.

Keywords: athletes, infrared thermography, mental and emotional control.

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