Emotional Touch: A Neuroscientific Overview

Emotional touch describes tactile sensations, including sensual stroking, pressure, vibration, itch and tickle, that can be pleasant or unpleasant. A brainstein-based reflexive 'reptilian' brain evolved into a 'limbic system'-based 'mammalian' brain that supports affective behaviour and emotional feeling states. The theory has various implications, including the notion that different bodily reactions accompany different emotional feelings. Different regions of frontal lobe and ventral anterior cingulate are involved in suppressing sympathetic arousal, and perhaps driving parasympathetic responses to different emotional behaviours. The brain systems that give rise to emotional feelings are enmeshed within the control systems that control the health and functioning of the body. The process of object handling to derive a sense and feel for the item can imbue the object with character, significance and emotional colour in a manner perhaps independent of functionality. The broader comprehension gained through object handling may ultimately be more satisfying, especially if the object is intrinsically pleasant to feel and hold.