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Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch
Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher’s emotional expressions (anger,...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5228183/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28079157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep40504 |
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author | Ravaja, N. Harjunen, V. Ahmed, I. Jacucci, G. Spapé, M. M. |
author_facet | Ravaja, N. Harjunen, V. Ahmed, I. Jacucci, G. Spapé, M. M. |
author_sort | Ravaja, N. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher’s emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee’s somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) in different temporal ranges. Participants were presented with tactile stimulation appearing to originate from expressive characters in virtual reality. Touch processing was indexed using SEPs, and self-reports of touch experience were collected. Early potentials were found to be amplified after angry, happy and sad facial expressions, while late potentials were amplified after anger but attenuated after happiness. These effects were related to two stages of emotional modulation of tactile perception: anticipation and interpretation. The findings show that not only does touch affect emotion, but also emotional expressions affect touch perception. The affective modulation of touch was initially obtained as early as 25 ms after the touch onset suggesting that emotional context is integrated to the tactile sensation at a very early stage. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5228183 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-52281832017-01-17 Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch Ravaja, N. Harjunen, V. Ahmed, I. Jacucci, G. Spapé, M. M. Sci Rep Article Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher’s emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee’s somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) in different temporal ranges. Participants were presented with tactile stimulation appearing to originate from expressive characters in virtual reality. Touch processing was indexed using SEPs, and self-reports of touch experience were collected. Early potentials were found to be amplified after angry, happy and sad facial expressions, while late potentials were amplified after anger but attenuated after happiness. These effects were related to two stages of emotional modulation of tactile perception: anticipation and interpretation. The findings show that not only does touch affect emotion, but also emotional expressions affect touch perception. The affective modulation of touch was initially obtained as early as 25 ms after the touch onset suggesting that emotional context is integrated to the tactile sensation at a very early stage. Nature Publishing Group 2017-01-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5228183/ /pubmed/28079157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep40504 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Ravaja, N. Harjunen, V. Ahmed, I. Jacucci, G. Spapé, M. M. Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title | Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title_full | Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title_fullStr | Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title_full_unstemmed | Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title_short | Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch |
title_sort | feeling touched: emotional modulation of somatosensory potentials to interpersonal touch |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5228183/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28079157 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep40504 |
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