The role of empathy in the neural responses to observed human social touch

Abstract

One of the ways in which individuals convey feelings and thoughts to one another is through touch. Although the neural responses to felt and observed tactile stimuli between an inanimate object and a part of the human body have been vastly explored, the neural responses to observed human interaction involving touch are not well understood. Considering that the observation of social touch involves vicarious sharing of emotions, we hypothesized that levels of empathic traits modulate the neural responses to observed touch and focused on the attenuation in the mu\alpha rhythm (8-13Hz), a neural marker that has been related to sensorimotor resonance. Fifty-four participants observed photos depicting social touch, nonsocial touch, or no touch while their electroencephalography (EEG) activity was recorded. Results showed that interindividual differences in levels of empathic traits modulated both behavioral and electrophysiological responses to human social touch, such that highly empathic participants evaluated human social touch as inducing more pleasant emotions and exhibited greater mu suppression upon observation of human social touch compared to less empathic participants. Specifically, both the behavioral and the electrophysiological responses to observed social touch were predicted by levels of personal distress, a measure of emotional contagion. These findings indicate that the behavioral and electrophysiological responses to observed social touch are modulated by levels of empathy.

Brain-to-brain coupling during handholding is associated with pain reduction

“…of the female partner with fronto-central regions of the male partner that are very close to somatosensory regions. Research indicates that social touch activates somatosensory areas, as expressed in the alpha-mu band (94)(95)(96) and the P45 somatosensory-evoked potentials amplitude (24). Moreover, touch was found to increase the coupling of electrodermal activity, which was found to be correlated with the somatosensory activation (63).…”

Don't touch me! autistic traits modulate early and late ERP components during visual perception of social touch

“…Written informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to the experiment, and the study was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of the University of Haifa. The same group of participants was reported in a different article [Peled‐Avron, Levy‐Gigi, Richter‐Levin, Korem, & Shamay‐Tsoory, ], however no overlapping data is used in this experiment and its analyses. Prior to the experiment, each participant completed the Spielberger State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) to assess their anxiety levels.…”

“…The task used in this experiment was similar to the task described in Peled‐Avron, Levy‐Gigi, et al [] and Peled‐Avron, Perry, and Shamay‐Tsoory []. During the task, the participant sat approximately 60 cm from a 21" CRT monitor and was presented with a computerized task (E‐Prime 2.2 Psychological Software Tools was used for stimulus presentation and experimental control).…”

EEG Mu ( µ ) rhythm spectra and oscillatory activity differentiate stuttering from non-stuttering adults

“…Though they can be observed in various regions of the cortex (Schnitzler et al, 2000;Hauswald et al, 2013;Kodama et al, 2016), the primary sources of μ rhythms lie within anterior regions of the dorsal stream (e.g., premotor and primary motor cortices). Within sensorimotor μ rhythms, activity in the β band is thought to encode motor information (Pfurtscheller, 1981;Toro et al, 1994;Seeber et al, 2014), and activity within the α band is thought to encode somatosensory and auditory feedback (Cheyne et al, 2003;Gaetz and Cheyne, 2006;Tamura et al, 2012;Sebastiani et al, 2014;Peled-Avron et al, 2016). Thus, if stuttering is associated with reduced capacity for generating forward models in motor regions, μ spectral differences, particularly in β frequencies, might be expected when comparing PWS to non-stuttering groups.…”