Validation and psychometric properties of the Russian version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ-37 Rus)

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that nurturing and affiliative touch is essential for human emotional and physical well-being throughout our entire life. Within the last 30 years a system of low-threshold mechanosensitive C fibers innervating the hairy skin was discovered and described; this system is hypothesized to represent the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch. This discovery opens new perspectives for multidisciplinary research of the role of affiliative social touch in health and disease, and calls for establishing novel psychometric tools assessing individual differences in the domain of affective touch. The main objective of the study was to construct and validate a Russian version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ), a self-report measure recently developed to quantify individual experience and attitude to social and affective touch. A pool of 117 items was translated into Russian and all the items were assessed for appropriateness for Russian culture (232 participants). After exploring the factor structure (468 participants), we composed a 37-item questionnaire (TEAQ-37 Rus) characterized by good reliability and a clear 5-factor structure, covering the aspects of attitude to intimate touch, attitude to friendly touch, attitude to self-care, current intimate touch experiences, and childhood touch experiences. Confirmatory factor analysis (551 participants) has demonstrated good consistency and reliability of the 5-factor structure of the TEAQ-37 Rus. Cross-validation research demonstrated moderate positive correlations between predisposition to social touch and emotional intelligence; positive correlations with extraversion and openness facets of the Big Five personality model were also found. As predicted, participants with higher TEAQ-37 Rus scores rated all observed kinds of touch as more pleasant, with a particular preference for slow touch. We anticipate that this questionnaire will be a valuable tool for researchers of social touch, touch perception abnormalities, and the importance of touch experiences for emotional and mental health.

Childhood Adversity and Affective Touch Perception: A Comparison of United Kingdom Care Leavers and Non-care Leavers

“…For example, Sailer and Ackerley (2017) found that adults self-reporting a low frequency of social tactile interactions rated CT optimal touch as less pleasant than a group who reported frequent touch. However, it seems unlikely current levels of touch are driving our effects because, using our previously validated self-report measure ( Trotter et al, 2018a , b ), we found no difference between the two groups in their current experiences of either intimate touch or tactile interactions with friends and family.…”

Vicarious Ratings of Self vs. Other-directed Social Touch in Women with and Recovered from Anorexia Nervosa

“…A mean score was calculated for each of the six subscales; friends and family touch (FFT) (11 items), current intimate touch (CIT) (14 items), childhood touch (ChT) (9 items), attitude to self-care (ASC) (5 items), attitude to intimate touch (AIT) (13 items) and attitude to unfamiliar touch (AUT) (5 items), with negatively worded questions reversed scored. The TEAQ questionnaire was found to have a good internal consistency with Cronbach α= 0.78-0.92 [52,66]. For this investigation, we were particularly interested on the TEAQ Attitude to intimate touch (AIT) subscale because previous investigations suggest that AN patients experience intimate stimuli with lower valence and dominance than healthy controls [53].…”

“…Moreover, we chose to display videos showing only males delivering touch and females receiving touch as generally males appear to initiate touch more than females do [67,68]. All videos were taken from a database of previously standardised video clips [66]. Touch was delivered across five different body regions: non-CT-innervated body site i.e., palm vs. CT-innervated body sites i.e., back, ventral forearm, cheek and upper arm) with 3 different stroking velocities: static (0 cm/s), slow (5cm/s) and fast (30 cm/s).…”

“…Participants also responded to a second question asking: "How pleasant do you think that action was for the person being touched?" (3 rd person perspective) using a 100-point VAS scale ranging from 0 = very unpleasant to 100 = extremely pleasant [66]. This question concerns the ability of participants to determine mental states of another and evaluate how pleasant the touch received was for the actor in the video (other-directed touch).…”

“…This question concerns the ability of participants to determine mental states of another and evaluate how pleasant the touch received was for the actor in the video (other-directed touch). Overall, there was a total of 15 videos randomly presented, with each video being presented once to participants, each displayed in 240 p YouTube quality in full HD (1920×1080 pixels) at 25 fps rate [66].…”