The communication of emotion via touch.

Abstract

The study of emotional communication has focused predominantly on the facial and vocal channels but has ignored the tactile channel. Participants in the current study were allowed to touch an unacquainted partner on the whole body to communicate distinct emotions. Of interest was how accurately the person being touched decoded the intended emotions without seeing the tactile stimulation. The data indicated that anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy were decoded at greater than chance levels, as well as happiness and sadness, 2 emotions that have not been shown to be communicated by touch to date. Moreover, fine-grained coding documented specific touch behaviors associated with different emotions. The findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to the study of emotion-related communication.

The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch

“…Hertenstein et al (2006) reported no influence of the gender of decoders and encoders on the success of emotional communication, a result confirmed in a more recent study with 124 dyads (Hertenstein et al 2009). In the light of their results, and given the constraints of the present study, gender was allowed to be confounded to some degree with the couple/stranger factor, in an unbalanced design in which most decoders received touch from opposite gender romantic partners, and same gender strangers.…”

“…The interaction between Group and Relationship status was completely absent (F<1), with the same mean advantage in accuracy of 1.6 for partners over strangers in each Group. While acknowledging the low power of this analysis, taken together with the results reported by Hertenstein et al (2006Hertenstein et al ( , 2009 we were confident that our results were unlikely to reflect gender effects to any significant extent.…”

“…Mean kappa for a decoder choosing the correct emotion term was .47 for couples and .31 for strangers. Compared to a conservative estimate of a chance rate of 25% (as used by Hertenstein et al, 2006Hertenstein et al, , 2009, both groups performed significantly above chance (t(29) = 6.61, p < .001, for couples, t(29) = 3.47, p < .005, for strangers). Taking each foursome as a unit of analysis, mean accuracy was greater with partners within a foursome than with strangers in 11 of the 15 foursomes, and only worse in 1 (Wilcoxon T = 2, p < .001).…”

Como o estudante de enfermagem percebe a comunicação com o paciente em saúde mental

“…(8) Due to different sensory stimuli in childhood, adolescence and the adult phase, the emotions between men and women are also distinct. (9) Differences are clear, as well as their effects and the singular gender description of who touches and is touched. (10) This study favored the discussion among the students about their behavior and that of the patients with mental disorders, (4) reducing obstacles in the form of perceiving it.…”

Design of a Massage-Inspired Haptic Device for Interpersonal Connection in Long-Distance Communication

“…Still, interpersonal touch is still used in intimate relationships, as it is an important form of communication for conveying intimate emotions such as love and sympathy [3]. Indeed recent studies have shown that basic emotions, e.g., anger, fear, and happiness, can be communicated through touch only [4,5].…”