Social touch experience in different contexts: A review
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A2 Katsausartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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Date
2021-12
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Language
en
Pages
13
360-372
360-372
Series
NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS, Volume 131
Abstract
Social touch is increasingly utilized in a variety of psychological interventions, ranging from parent-child interventions to psychotherapeutic treatments. Less attention has been paid, however, to findings that exposure to social touch may not necessarily evoke positive or pleasant responses. Social touch can convey different emotions from love and gratitude to harassment and envy, and persons’ preferences to touch and be touched do not necessarily match with each other. This review of altogether 99 original studies focuses on how contextual factors modify target person's behavioral and brain responses to social touch. The review shows that experience of social touch is strongly modified by a variety of toucher-related and situational factors: for example, toucher's facial expressions, physical attractiveness, relationship status, group membership, and touched person's psychological distress. At the neural level, contextual factors modify processing of social touch from early perceptual processing to reflective cognitive evaluation. Based on the review, we present implications for using social touch in behavioral and neuroscientific research designs.Description
Funding Information: This study was supported by the Academy of Finland (grant #332312 to Prevent Consortium and grant #332309 ) and by the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology ICN HSE RF Government grant ag. No. 075-15-2019-1930 and by the International Laboratory of Social Neurobiology ICN HSE RF Government grant ag. No. 075-15-2019-1930 (to Iiro P. Jääskeläinen). Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors
Keywords
Affective touch, Context, CT touch, Interpersonal touch, Intervention, Skin-to-skin contact, Touch exposure
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Citation
Saarinen, A, Harjunen, V, Jasinskaja-Lahti, I, Jääskeläinen, I P & Ravaja, N 2021, ' Social touch experience in different contexts : A review ', NEUROSCIENCE AND BIOBEHAVIORAL REVIEWS, vol. 131, pp. 360-372 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.09.027