Neural responses to social touch with different emotional valences: an fNIRS study.

ABSTRACT: Social touch conveys a wealth of social and emotional information in interpersonal contexts. Despite the complexity of social touch in real-life situations, past research has often focused on CT-targeted social touch, neglecting the social-emotional expression in real social touch. Thus, we created a social touch paradigm in which the stimuli were derived from the Social Affective Touch Database. Using fNIRS, we investigated neural responses to social touch under different emotional valences. Our study found that under different touch conditions, the primary somatosensory cortex (S1), the superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) were broadly activated. Additionally, we also found that the PFC mediates the pathway between S1 and Premotor Cortex-Somatomotor Cortex (PMC

SUBMITTER: Tang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12380468 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature