Touching emotions: Recent advances in affective touch research

Abstract submission is now open! Click here to submit your poster. 

This workshop will cover recent behavioral and neuroscientific advances in affective touch research.

 Affective touch plays an essential role in our daily interactions by allowing us to assess pleasant and unpleasant aspects of touch. In recent decades, affective touch has gained traction both scientifically and in applications. However, the field is still in its infancy with many facets yet to be explored. This workshop will cover recent behavioral and neuroscientific advances in affective touch research in healthy and clinical populations by bridging the gap between experimental evidence and haptic applications. Invited speakers will present recent findings that touch upon the interplay between social and physical properties of touch – the fine line between pleasant and unpleasant touch in healthy and clinical populations, and affective experience of haptic wearables. Selected posters will encourage discussions and engagement in among experts and participants, advancing the ever-evolving field of affective touch!   

Comfortable in our own skin: The role of affective touch in health and disease

Laura Crucianelli - Queen Mary University of London

Touch plays a vital role in social and self development, and in the maintenance of psychological wellbeing in humans. Recently, philosophy, neuroscience and psychology alike have paid increasing attention to the study of interpersonal affective touch, which refers to the emotional and motivational facets of tactile sensation. Some aspects of affective touch have been linked to a neurophysiologically specialised system, namely the C tactile (CT) system, which projects to the insular cortex, a core brain region for bodily self-awareness and homeostatic regulation. I will discuss recent findings showing disruptions in the perception and anticipation of affective touch in people with and recovered from Anorexia Nervosa, a psychiatric disorder characterised by restricting eating and body image distortions. Taken together such studies highlight the potential role of social, affective touch for affective regulation and body awareness, the absence of which can lead to life-long struggles in feeling comfortable within one’s own skin.

Please do not touch! Neural correlates of aesthetic processing of material surfaces

Thomas Jacobsen, Barbara E. Marschallek, & Andreas Löw - Helmut Schmidt University

Active fingertip exploration and aesthetic processing of a countless number of materials’ surfaces are part of everyday life. The present study was performed to investigate the underlying brain correlates using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). In absence of other sensory modalities, individuals (n = 21) first performed lateral movements on a total of 48 textile and wood surfaces varying in terms of their roughness followed by aesthetic judgments of their pleasantness (feels good or bad?). Behavioral results supported the influence of the stimuli’s roughness on aesthetic judgments, with smoother textures being rated as feeling better than rough textures. At the neural level, fNIRS activation results revealed an overall increased engagement of the contralateral sensorimotor areas as well as left prefrontal areas. Furthermore, the assessed pleasantness modulated specific activations of left prefrontal areas with increasing pleasantness showing greater activations of these regions. Remarkably, this positive relationship was most pronounced for smooth woods. The present study demonstrates that positively valenced touch by actively exploring material surfaces is linked to left prefrontal activity and thus extends previous findings of affective touch underlying passive movements on hairy skin.

Mapping the physical and social domains of interpersonal touch

Sarah McIntyre - Linköping University

Interpersonal touch is a critical part of our social lives, and the nervous system is organised to process touch inputs and facilitate their social interpretation. The skin-to-skin mechanical techniques we use during social touch interactions are shaped by our physical bodies and the environment. Here we investigate the interpretations and associations of social touch with the physical features of touch stimuli. When prompted with social scenarios, touch expressions are complex, and dynamic, with repeating and changing elements. The distribution of measured contact characteristics is broader than what is typically tested in psychophysics and neuroscience studies, but small differences in touch delivery can still discriminate the social message being conveyed. When we independently manipulate contact area, velocity, axis of motion and force we evoke a wide array of sensory descriptors, imagined social scenarios, and complex emotional interactions. Our sensory-descriptor maps suggest new labels that should be considered in quantitative lab studies. Finally, neural responses to the contact characteristics present in social touch reveal differences among mechanoreceptor sub-classes in the capacity to discriminate socially relevant features at a functional time-scale.

Navigating Pleasure and Pain: The Dynamic Role of C-Low Threshold Mechanoreceptors

Saad  Nagi - Linköping University

The peripheral neural substrates for pain have been studied for over a century. However, it is only in the last two decades that we started exploring the neural substrates subserving pleasant or affective touch. C-low threshold mechanoreceptors (C-LTMRs) are considered crucial for the hedonic aspects of touch, especially the pleasantness of caressing touch. Nevertheless, the line separating pleasant touch and pain is not static but can be reconfigured by acute or chronic pain. We have shown that C-LTMR stimulation can produce allodynia, in which a normally pleasant stimulus becomes painful. Furthermore, recurring episodes of muscle pain, produced by physical activity or intramuscular injections of hypertonic saline, lead to gentle touch and innocuous cooling being perceived as painful – a phenotype consistently linked to C-LTMR activation. Using microneurography, guided by recent molecular insights from single-cell RNA sequencing of human dorsal root ganglion neurons, we have identified novel C-LTMR properties that will be presented.

Charting User Experience of Touch Interactions with Haptic Devices and Robots

Hasti Seifi - Arizona State University

Touch, a fundamental aspect of human communication and emotion, holds immense potential in shaping user experience in various interactive domains. In this talk, I will present three research directions in my lab, focusing on the user experience of touch interactions with robots, virtual humans, and haptic devices. First, I will describe our research on charting and predicting user perception of robotic hands and touch. Next, I will present research on social touch interactions between a human and a virtual remote person. Finally, I will discuss our progress toward understanding users’ sensory and emotional language for surface electrovibration signals.