The development and validation of sensory and emotional scales of touch perception

Abstract

No comprehensive language exists that describes the experience of touch. Three experiments were conducted to take steps toward establishing a touch lexicon. In Experiment I, 49 participants rated how well 262 adjectives described sensory, emotional and evaluative aspects of touch. In Experiment II, participants rated pairwise dissimilarities of the most descriptive words of the set. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions representing semanticperceptual spaces underlying the words resulted in a touch perception task (TPT) consisting of 26 'sensory' attributes (e.g., bumpiness) and 14 'emotional' attributes (e.g., pleasurable). In Experiment III, 40 participants used the TPT to rate unseen textured materials that were moved actively or received passively against the index fingerpad, volar forearm, and two underarm sites. MDS confirmed similar semantic-perceptual structures in Experiments II and III. Factor analysis of Experiment III data decomposed the sensory attribute ratings into factors labeled Roughness, Slip, Pile and Firmness, and the emotional attribute ratings into Comfort and Arousal factors. Factor scores varied among materials and sites. Greater intensity of sensory and emotional responses were reported when participants passively, as opposed to actively, received stimuli. The sensitivity of the TPT in identifying body site and mode of touch-related perceptual differences affirms the validity and utility of this novel linguistic/perceptual tool.

Specification of Individuality in Causal Relationships among Texture-related Attributes, Emotions, and Preferences

“…Nagano et al [8] developed a method to establish the semantically layered model of psychophysical, affective, and preferential adjectives, on the basis of impact relationships among the words. Guest et al [7] and Ackerley et al [11] projected textures into both psychophysical and emotional spaces, with each space being described by at least three individual dimensions. The specified emotional space appears to correspond to classical emotion models [12,13], in which human emotions are expressed in the two-or three-dimensional spaces.…”

“…Experiences pertaining to touch are sometimes categorized into semantically different layers [6][7][8], as shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…Chen et al [6] Figure 1: Semantically layered structures of touch-related adjective dyads. The words in each layer were selected from the literature [6][7][8]. The structure of the lower level layer varies less across people, whereas that of the higher layer is more dependent on individual perceptions.…”

Making Tactile Textures with Predefined Affective Properties

“…The decision to include natural was informed by the existence of another research project attempting to measure naturalness [64]. The words used in this study are consistent with those used in other affective studies of touch (see for example [65]). Direct comparisons with other studies are difficult, however, because the words used often depend on the context of the investigation.…”

Graphical Modeling Method of Texture-related Affective and Perceptual Responses

“…Such products comprise the packaging materials for food and general items [1], and seat fabrics [2]. Previous studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] agree that the upper layers of such a model contain the more affective factors, which are affected by integrated multiple sensory cues and individual knowledge, while the lower layers contain responses that are largely dependent on the perception of physical stimuli.…”