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Affective Touch is encoded by pupil dilation as a comprehensive social phenomenon
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  • Greta Bonino,
  • Alessandro Mazza,
  • Francesca Capiotto,
  • Annamaira Berti,
  • Lorenzo Pia,
  • Olga Dal Monte
Greta Bonino
Università degli Studi di Torino
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Alessandro Mazza
Università degli Studi di Torino
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Francesca Capiotto
Università degli Studi di Torino
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Annamaira Berti
Università degli Studi di Torino
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Lorenzo Pia
Universita degli Studi di Torino
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Olga Dal Monte
Università degli Studi di Torino

Corresponding Author:olga.dalmonte@unito.it

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Abstract

Affective Touch plays a pivotal role in regulating emotions, fostering social bonds, and nurturing affiliations with others. Its emotional and arousing dimensions rely on specific features of tactile stimulations characterizing gentle human caresses, such as touch velocity and the nature of the stroking source. While previous research has examined the physiological responses to these individual features of Affective Touch, no study has explored how they interact to shape autonomic activity. In this study, we investigated whether and how both the nature of the touching effector (Human hand vs. Artificial hand) and touch type (Dynamic vs. Static) influenced the participants’ pupil dilation and their subjective experience during tactile stimulation. We observed that when participants received a dynamic touch, they displayed an increase in pupil dilation when the touch was promoted by a human compared to an artificial hand, and that such discrimination was absent for static touch. Also, dynamic touch promoted by a human hand invoked a supralinear enhancement of pupil dilation indicating that the combination of these two features induced a significantly stronger autonomic activation than the summed effects of each separately. Moreover, this specific type of touch was perceived as the most pleasant compared to all other tactile stimulations. Overall, our results suggest that pupil dilation could map the pleasant experience of human-to-human tactile interactions, supporting the notion that the autonomic nervous system encodes the emotional and hedonic aspects associated with Affective Touch as a complex and holistic social experience, rather than solely responding to its low-level sensory properties.
24 Jan 2024Submitted to European Journal of Neuroscience
25 Jan 2024Submission Checks Completed
25 Jan 2024Assigned to Editor
25 Jan 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
29 Jan 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned