Human C-Tactile Afferents Are Tuned to the Temperature of a Skin-Stroking Caress

Ackerley, Rochelle; Wasling, Helena Backlund; Liljencrantz, Jaquette; Olausson, Håkan; Johnson, Richard D.; Wessberg, Johan

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2847-13.2014

Cited by 373 publications

(423 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Moreover, results confirmed descriptions of awareness of diminishing pain (pain VAS), and that they were significantly more satisfied with treatment than those only receiving ST [10] . Results also support previously reported treatment effects of CST in pregnancy-related back pain [41] , and research showing that lightly touching the skin [36] can elicit physiological responses [53] .…”

Section: Study Methodssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…Moreover, newly published research concludes that CT (C tactile) afferents, a distinct type of unmyelinated, low-threshold mechanoreceptive units, existing in the hairy but not glabrous skin of humans and other mammals, are attuned to respond to tactile stimuli with the specific characteristics of a gentle caress delivered at typical skin temperature, which is the case in CST. This stimulation provides a peripheral mechanism for signalling pleasant skin-to-skin contact in humans, which promotes interpersonal contact and associated behaviour [36] . It is also possible that the effects could be due to expectations of pain relief and the therapeutic relationship between patient and therapist.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of craniosacral therapy as experienced by pregnant women with severe pelvic girdle pain: An interview study

Elden

Lundgren

Robertson³

2014

Clinical Nursing Studies

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Background: Pelvic girdle pain (PGP) affects 50% of pregnant women worldwide. PGP increases with advancing pregnancy with considerable impact on quality of life, interfering with sleep, daily activities, work, motherhood and close interpersonal relationships. The use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is increasingly prevalent among pregnant women, particularly for pregnancy-induced back pain. Craniosacral treatment (CST) is a CAM that has shown symptom relieving effects in pregnancy-related back pain. The purpose of this study was to describe women's experiences of the treatment.Methods: Twenty-seven women receiving CST plus standard treatment (ST) were interviewed following 3 of 5 treatments with CST by two qualified and experienced CST practitioners. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Results:The experience of CST by pregnant women diagnosed with severe PGP can be described in three categories: An unfamiliar and different treatment method; description of treatment effects, and regaining a personal and social life.Women described how CST provided them with new awareness of their widespread muscle tension. They told of how they experienced increased body awareness, distraction from pain, relaxation and calm, and feelings of security and optimism. These factors may have helped them actively improve posture and lower muscle tension thereby relieving the symptoms of PGP. Conclusions:The present study reports a contextual interpretation of previously published quantitative data, as it provides a deeper understanding of total symptom relief from PGP during pregnancy. Trial registration:The trial is registered at Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN30566933.

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Section: Study Methodssupporting

confidence: 88%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of craniosacral therapy as experienced by pregnant women with severe pelvic girdle pain: An interview study

Elden

Lundgren

Robertson³

2014

Clinical Nursing Studies

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“…Firstly, it is available when the mother is holding her infant. Secondly, it is one of the sites where the presence of CT afferents have been confirmed, and thirdly, it is commonly used in studies of affective touch (Ackerley et al, 2014;Bj€ ornsdotter et al, 2014;Croy et al, 2016;Kaiser et al, 2015;L€ oken et al, 2009). The stimuli were administered in 2-s epochs in a randomized counterbalanced order.…”

Section: Tactile Stimulation and Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…CT afferents are preferentially activated by touch that mimics typical human to human caressing, i.e. light pressure, skin temperature and slow stroking velocities between 1 and 10 cm/s (Ackerley et al, 2014). In addition, the firing frequency of the CT afferents positively correlates with the degree of perceived pleasantness of stroking stimulation (L€ oken et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective and non-affective touch evoke differential brain responses in 2-month-old infants

et al. 2018

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A B S T R A C TCaressing touch is an effective way to communicate emotions and to create social bonds. It is also one of the key mediators of early parental bonding. The caresses are generally thought to represent a social form of touching and indeed, slow, gentle brushing is encoded in specialized peripheral nerve fibers, the C-tactile (CT) afferents. In adults, areas such as the posterior insula and superior temporal sulcus are activated by affective, slow stroking touch but not by fast stroking stimulation. However, whether these areas are activated in infants, after social tactile stimulation, is unknown.In this study, we compared the total hemoglobin responses measured with diffuse optical tomography (DOT) in the left hemisphere following slow and fast stroking touch stimulation in 16 2-month-old infants. We compared slow stroking (optimal CT afferent stimulation) to fast stroking (non-optimal CT stimulation). Activated regions were delineated using two methods: one based on contrast between the two conditions, and the other based on voxel-based statistical significance of the difference between the two conditions. The first method showed a single activation cluster in the temporal cortex with center of gravity in the middle temporal gyrus where the total hemoglobin increased after the slow stroking relative to the fast stroking (p ¼ 0.04 uncorrected). The second method revealed a cluster in the insula with an increase in total hemoglobin in the insular cortex in response to slow stroking relative to fast stroking (p ¼ 0.0005 uncorrected; p ¼ 0.04 corrected for multiple comparisons).These activation clusters encompass areas that are involved in processing of affective, slow stroking touch in the adult brain. We conclude that the infant brain shows a pronounced and adult-like response to slow stroking touch compared to fast stroking touch in the insular cortex but the expected response in the primary somatosensory cortex was not found at this age. The results imply that emotionally valent touch is encoded in the brain in adult-like manner already soon after birth and this suggests a potential for involvement of touch in bonding with the caretaker.

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“…Apart from the discriminative function of touch, the human sense of touch also plays an important role in affective experiences. Caress-like stroking touches have been found to selectively activate specific receptors called C-Tactile (CT) afferents in the hairy skin, which respond particularly strongly to stroking at a velocity of about 3 cm/s [1,78,82]. Strokes at this velocity also result in the highest subjective pleasantness ratings [77,78].…”

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confidence: 99%

Socially intelligent robots that understand and respond to human touch

Jung¹

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Touch is an important nonverbal form of interpersonal interaction which is used to communicate emotions and other social messages. As interactions with social robots are likely to become more common in the near future these robots should also be able to engage in tactile interaction with humans. Therefore, the aim of the research presented in this dissertation is to work towards socially intelligent robots that can understand and respond to human touch. To become a socially intelligent actor a robot must be able to sense, classify and interpret human touch and respond to this in an appropriate manner. To this end we present work that addresses different parts of this interaction cycle.After the introduction in Part I of the dissertation, we have taken a datadriven approach in Part II. We have focused on the sense and classify steps of the interaction cycle to automatically recognize social touch gestures such as pat, stroke and tickle from pressure sensor data.In Chapter 2 we present CoST: Corpus of Social Touch, a dataset containing 7805 captures of 14 different social touch gestures. All touch gestures were performed in three variants: gentle, normal and rough on a pressure sensitive mannequin arm. Recognition of these 14 gesture classes using various classifiers yielded accuracies of up to 60%; moreover, gentle gestures proved to be harder to classify than normal and rough gestures. We further investigated how different classifiers, interpersonal differences, gesture confusions and gesture variants affected the recognition accuracy.In Chapter 3 we describe the outcome of a machine learning challenge on touch gesture recognition. This challenge was extended to the research community working on multimodal interaction with the goal of sparking interest in the touch modality and to promote exploration of the use of data processing techniques from other more mature modalities for touch recognition. Two datasets were made available containing labeled pressure sensor data of social touch gestures: the CoST dataset presented in Chapter 2 and the Human-Animal Affective Robot Touch (HAART) gesture set. The most important outcomes of the challenges were: (1) transferring techniques from other modalities, such as image processing, speech, and human action recognition provided valuable feature sets; (2) gesture classification confusions were similar despite the various data processing methods that were used. vii In Part III of the dissertation we present three studies on the use of social touch in interaction with robot pets. We have mainly focused on the interpret and respond steps of the interaction cycle to identify which touch gestures a robot pet should understand, how touch can be interpreted within a social context and in which ways a robot can respond to human touch.In Chapter 4 we present a study of which the aim was to gain more insight into the factors that are relevant to interpret the meaning of touch within a social context. We elicited touch behaviors by letting participants interact with a robot pet com...

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Human C-Tactile Afferents Are Tuned to the Temperature of a Skin-Stroking Caress

Cited by 373 publications

References 36 publications

Effects of craniosacral therapy as experienced by pregnant women with severe pelvic girdle pain: An interview study

Effects of craniosacral therapy as experienced by pregnant women with severe pelvic girdle pain: An interview study

Affective and non-affective touch evoke differential brain responses in 2-month-old infants

Socially intelligent robots that understand and respond to human touch

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