Maternal touch predicts social orienting in young children

Reece, Christy; Ebstein, Richard P.; Cheng, Xiaoqin; Ng, Thian C.; Schirmer, Annett

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.05.001

Cited by 44 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 71 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In line with this possibility, the present study identified a positive relation between the frequency of maternal touch and how actively children touched their mothers. Additionally, a related behavioral study using a similar observation protocol found a relation between the frequency of maternal touch and the children's bias toward social relative to nonsocial stimuli ( Reece C et al in press ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency of Maternal Touch Predicts Resting Activity and Connectivity of the Developing Social Brain

Bräuer

Xiao

Poulain³

et al. 2016

Cereb. Cortex

Self Cite

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous behavioral research points to a positive relationship between maternal touch and early social development. Here, we explored the brain correlates of this relationship. The frequency of maternal touch was recorded for 43 five-year-old children during a 10 min standardized play session. Additionally, all children completed a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging session. Investigating the default mode network revealed a positive relation between the frequency of maternal touch and activity in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) extending into the temporo-parietal junction. Using this effect as a seed in a functional connectivity analysis identified a network including extended bilateral regions along the temporal lobe, bilateral frontal cortex, and left insula. Compared with children with low maternal touch, children with high maternal touch showed additional connectivity with the right dorso-medial prefrontal cortex. Together these results support the notion that childhood tactile experiences shape the developing “social brain” with a particular emphasis on a network involved in mentalizing.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency of Maternal Touch Predicts Resting Activity and Connectivity of the Developing Social Brain

Bräuer

Xiao

Poulain³

et al. 2016

Cereb. Cortex

Self Cite

115

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Nevertheless, this line of research together with other studies on parent-infant interactions (e.g. Stack and Muir 1992;Stack et al 1996;Feldman et al 2002;Jean et al 2014;Reece et al 2016) suggest that it is not merely the availability of maternal touch that affects infant behaviour, but importantly the quality of the touch itself. In general, a vast amount of research has demonstrated that light massage has beneficial effect on a number of different outcome measures, known to relate to the infant's well-being (see Underdown et al 2006, for a review).…”

Section: A Touch Of Love: the Role Of Interpersonal Affective Touch Imentioning

confidence: 87%

Developmental Perspectives on Interpersonal Affective Touch

Crucianelli

Filippetti

2018

Topoi

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the last decade, 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. While the role of this system for affiliation, social bonding and communication of emotions have been widely investigated, only recently researchers have started to focus on the potential role of interpersonal affective touch in acquiring awareness of the body as our own, i.e. as belonging to our psychological 'self'. We review and discuss recent developmental and adult findings, pointing to the central role of interpersonal affective touch in body awareness and social cognition in health and disorders. We propose that interpersonal affective touch, as an interoceptive modality invested of a social nature, can uniquely contribute to the ongoing debate in philosophy about the primacy of the relational nature of the minimal self.

show abstract

“…A large body of literature documents benefits of skin-to-skin contact during infancy and early childhood (Field, Diego, Hernandez-Reif, Deeds, & Figuereido, 2006 ; Vickers, Ohlsson, Lacy, & Horsley, 2004 ), including aspects of social functioning such as the management of negative emotions and responsiveness to caregivers (for a review, see Field, Diego, & Hernandez-Reif, 2010 ). Children receiving more maternal touch reach out to their mothers more and have an accelerated development of the adult face bias whereby attention shifts to face rather than nonface objects (Reece, Ebstein, Cheng, Ng, & Schirmer, 2016 ). Furthermore, high-touch children differ from low-touch children in how they activate the “social brain.” When wakefully at rest, they engage the right posterior superior temporal sulcus more strongly and show greater functional connectivity between this region and the medial prefrontal cortex (Brauer, Xiao, Poulain, Friederici, & Schirmer, 2016 )—both areas implicated in understanding others’ emotions (Escoffier, Zhong, Schirmer, & Qiu, 2013 ; Schirmer & Adolphs, 2017 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The right touch: Stroking of CT-innervated skin promotes vocal emotion processing

Schirmer

Gunter

2017

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research has revealed a special mechanoreceptor, called C-tactile (CT) afferent, that is situated in hairy skin and that seems relevant for the processing of social touch. We pursued a possible role of this receptor in the perception of other social signals such as a person’s voice. Participants completed three sessions in which they heard surprised and neutral vocal and nonvocal sounds and detected rare sound repetitions. In a given session, participants received no touch or soft brushstrokes to the arm (CT innervated) or palm (CT free). Event-related potentials elicited to sounds revealed that stroking to the arm facilitated the integration of vocal and emotional information. The late positive potential was greater for surprised vocal relative to neutral vocal and nonvocal sounds, and this effect was greater for arm touch relative to both palm touch and no touch. Together, these results indicate that stroking to the arm facilitates the allocation of processing resources to emotional voices, thus supporting the possibility that CT stimulation benefits social perception cross-modally.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13415-017-0537-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

show abstract

Maternal touch predicts social orienting in young children

Cited by 44 publications

References 71 publications

Frequency of Maternal Touch Predicts Resting Activity and Connectivity of the Developing Social Brain

Frequency of Maternal Touch Predicts Resting Activity and Connectivity of the Developing Social Brain

Developmental Perspectives on Interpersonal Affective Touch

The right touch: Stroking of CT-innervated skin promotes vocal emotion processing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About