Affective touch and regulation of stress responses

Kidd, Tara; Dferevine, Shaunna L.; Walker, Susannah

doi:10.1080/17437199.2022.2143854

Cited by 13 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 205 publications

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“…In our case, the interpersonal touch might be understood as such an external event, which alters the physiological state of the receiver and through this alteration allows an embodied interpretation or understanding of the communicated message. This view is supported by studies showing effects of touch on several physiological parameters, for example breathing frequency, heart rate and its variability, and stress hormone levels (for review see [31]). Furthermore, specifically, light stroking, which is typical for signalling calming or loving emotions [2], activates the insular cortex [32,33] associated with interoception [34].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Maallo,

Novembre,

Kusztor

et al. 2024

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Touch is an essential form of non-verbal communication. While language and its neural basis are widely studied, tactile communication is less well understood. We used fMRI and multivariate pattern analyses in pairs of emotionally close adults to examine the neural basis of human-to-human tactile communication. In each pair, a participant was designated either as sender or as receiver. The sender was instructed to communicate specific messages by touching only the arm of the receiver, who was inside the scanner. The receiver then identified the message based on the touch expression alone. We designed two multivariate decoder algorithms—one based on the sender's intent (sender-decoder), and another based on the receiver's response (receiver-decoder). We identified several brain areas that significantly predicted behavioural accuracy of the receiver. Regarding our a priori region of interest, the receiver's primary somatosensory cortex (S1), both decoders were able to accurately differentiate the messages based on neural activity patterns here. The receiver-decoder, which relied on the receivers' interpretations of the touch expressions, outperformed the sender-decoder, which relied on the sender's intent. Our results identified a network of brain areas involved in human-to-human tactile communication and supported the notion of non-sensory factors being represented in S1. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Sensing and feeling: an integrative approach to sensory processing and emotional experience’.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Maallo,

Novembre,

Kusztor

et al. 2024

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In our case, the interpersonal touch might be understood as such an external event, which alters the physiological state of the receiver and through this alteration allows for an embodied interpretation or understanding of the communicated message. This view is supported by studies showing effects of touch on several physiological parameters, for example breathing frequency, heart rate and its variability, and stress hormone levels (for review see Kidd et al, 2023). Furthermore, specifically light stroking, which is typical for signaling calming or loving emotions (McIntyre et al, 2022), activates the insular cortex (Björnsdotter et al 2009;Morrison, Björnsdotter, and Olausson 2011) associated with interoception (Craig, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Maallo,

Novembre,

Kusztor

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Touch is an essential form of non-verbal communication. While language and its neural basis are widely studied, tactile communication is less well understood. We used fMRI and multivariate pattern analyses in pairs of emotionally close adults to examine the neural basis of human-to-human tactile communication. In each pair, a participant was designated either as sender or as receiver. The sender was instructed to communicate specific messages by touching only the arm of the receiver, who was inside the scanner. The receiver then identified the message based on the touch expression alone. We designed two multivariate decoder algorithms – one based on the sender’s intent (sender-decoder), and another based on the receiver’s response (receiver-decoder). We identified several brain areas that significantly predicted behavioral accuracy of the receiver. Regarding our a priori region of interest, the receiver’s primary somatosensory cortex (S1), both decoders were able to accurately differentiate the messages based on neural activity patterns here. The receiver-decoder, which relied on the receivers’ interpretations of the touch expressions, outperformed the sender-decoder, which relied on the sender’s intent. Our results identified a network of brain areas involved in human-to-human tactile communication and supported the notion of non-sensory factors being represented in S1.

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“…Other strategies aimed to reduce social isolation and improve psychological well-being while minimizing pathogen spread can also be crucial for our health during a pandemic 48 , 140 , 141 , where outcomes may vary as a function of the nature of the interactions. For example, one might expect high infection transmission when touching a loved one compared to chatting with them, and Spencer et al 142 discussed how the infection risk due to spontaneous face and eye-touching may be accompanied by a gain in mutualistic microbiota.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SIR+ models: accounting for interaction-dependent disease susceptibility in the planning of public health interventions

Martignoni,

Raulo,

Linkovski

et al. 2024

Sci Rep

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Avoiding physical contact is regarded as one of the safest and most advisable strategies to follow to reduce pathogen spread. The flip side of this approach is that a lack of social interactions may negatively affect other dimensions of health, like induction of immunosuppressive anxiety and depression or preventing interactions of importance with a diversity of microbes, which may be necessary to train our immune system or to maintain its normal levels of activity. These may in turn negatively affect a population’s susceptibility to infection and the incidence of severe disease. We suggest that future pandemic modelling may benefit from relying on ‘SIR+ models’: epidemiological models extended to account for the benefits of social interactions that affect immune resilience. We develop an SIR+ model and discuss which specific interventions may be more effective in balancing the trade-off between minimizing pathogen spread and maximizing other interaction-dependent health benefits. Our SIR+ model reflects the idea that health is not just the mere absence of disease, but rather a state of physical, mental and social well-being that can also be dependent on the same social connections that allow pathogen spread, and the modelling of public health interventions for future pandemics should account for this multidimensionality.

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Affective touch and regulation of stress responses

Cited by 13 publications

References 205 publications

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

SIR+ models: accounting for interaction-dependent disease susceptibility in the planning of public health interventions

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