Abstract
In the United Kingdom, the most common reasons for a child to come under the care of social services are neglect and abuse. Such early childhood adversity is a risk factor for social-isolation and poor mental health in adulthood. Touch is a key channel for nurturing interactions, and previous studies have shown links between early somatosensory input, experience dependent neural plasticity, and later life emotional functioning. The aim of the present study was to test the relationship between childhood neglect/abuse and later life experiences, attitudes, and hedonic ratings of affective touch. Here, affective touch is defined as low force, dynamic touch which C-Tactile afferents (CTs) respond optimally to. We hypothesized that a childhood lacking in early nurturing tactile stimulation would be associated with reduced sensitivity to socially relevant affective touch in adulthood. To test this, 19 care leavers (average 9.32 ± 3.70 years in foster care) and 32 non-care leavers were recruited through opportunity sampling (mean age = 21.25 ± 1.74 years). Participants completed a range of psychophysical somatosensory tests. First, they rated the pleasantness of CT-optimal (3 cm/s) and non-CT-optimal (0.3 and 30 cm/s) stroking touch applied to their forearm, both robotically and by an experimenter. They also made vicarious ratings of the anticipated pleasantness of social tactile interactions depicted in a series of videos. Finally, they filled in the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) and the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ). As expected, care leavers reported significantly higher levels of childhood trauma than the control group. They also reported significantly lower levels of positive childhood touch compared to non-care leavers, but their attitudes and experiences of current intimate and affiliative touch did not differ. Across all psychophysical tests, care leavers showed specific reduction in sensitivity to the affective value of CT targeted 3 cm/s touch. The results of this study support the hypothesis that a lack of nurturing touch in early developmental periods leads to blunted sensitivity to the specific social value of affective touch. Future research should investigate the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying the observed effect.
Highlights
In the United Kingdom, the most common reasons for a child to come under the care of social services are neglect and abuse (Department for Education, 2019)
Analysis of Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) subscale scores using Mann-Whitney U tests to compare care leavers to non-care leavers identified that care leavers reported significantly higher levels of all types of childhood trauma, with a large effect size
Of the young adults who took part in this study, the 19 who had spent, on average, 9 years in foster care reported significantly higher levels of abuse and neglect on all subscales of the CTQ and significantly higher levels of trauma overall than age matched controls. When asked about their experiences and attitudes toward touch, only their experiences of childhood touch were significantly more negative than the control group. This is consistent with our previous finding that scores on the Childhood Trauma subscale of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ) are negatively predictive of scores on the CTQ (Trotter et al, 2018b)
Summary
In the United Kingdom, the most common reasons for a child to come under the care of social services are neglect and abuse (Department for Education, 2019). A range of studies have shown clear links between early nurturing tactile interactions, experience dependent neural plasticity, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis development, and later life social and emotional functioning (Levine, 2001; Meaney, 2001; Champagne et al, 2008; Franklin et al, 2011; Walker and McGlone, 2013; Walker et al, 2017a; Van Puyvelde et al, 2019a,b), with a paucity of early nurturing touch having adverse consequences (see Walker and McGlone, 2013; Bales et al, 2018 for reviews). Levels of parental care vary between individuals, with those receiving high levels of contact showing a greater density of connections within somatosensory cortex (Seelke et al, 2016)
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