Abstract
Affective sharing is a bottom-up process involving automatic processing of sensory inputs that facilitate vicarious experience of another’s emotional state. It is grounded directly in the prior experiences of the perceiver. In adults, vicarious ratings of affective touch match the known velocity tuning and hypothesised anatomical distribution of C-tactile afferents (CT), a subclass of C-fibre which respond preferentially to low force/velocity stroking touch, typically perceived as pleasant. Given the centrality of touch to early nurturing interactions, here we examined whether primary school aged children’s vicarious ratings of affective touch show the same anatomical and velocity specific patterns reported in adults. Forty-four children aged between 8 and 11 (mean age 9, 24 male) rated a sequence of video clips depicting one individual being touched by another on 5 different upper-body sites (palm, dorsal forearm, ventral forearm, upper-arm and back) at 3 different velocities (static, CT optimal, slow stroking and non-CT optimal, fast stroking). Immediately after viewing each clip, participants were asked to rate how pleasant they perceived the touch to be. While children rated the CT optimal velocity significantly higher than static or non-CT optimal touch, unlike adults their ratings did not vary across skin sites. This difference may reflect the fact children’s ratings are grounded in bottom-up affective resonance while adults also draw on top-down cognitive evaluation of the broader social context when rating the stimuli.
Highlights
Affective resonance is a bottom-up process which involves automatic processing of sensory inputs that facilitate vicarious experience of another’s emotional state [1]
Consistent with our hypothesis, primary school age children rated the vicarious observation of slowly moving touch, optimal for activating C-tactile afferents (CT), as significantly more pleasant than static or faster, non-CT optimal touch
This finding is in line with previous studies in adults showing that seen-touch produces the same, velocity dependent affective responses as felt-touch [14, 18, 19, 43]
Summary
Affective resonance is a bottom-up process which involves automatic processing of sensory inputs that facilitate vicarious experience of another’s emotional state [1]. The neural basis of affective sharing has been widely studied using pain observation paradigms, which reveal significant overlap between brain areas activated during vicarious and first-hand experience of pain [2–4]. Affective resonance for pain can be observed whether an actor’s facial expressions are being observed or not [4–6]. The perception-action coupling mechanisms which underpin affect sharing are present implicitly from birth [7, 8] and become explicit with experience through childhood and adolescence [9, 10]. They are likely to provide the initial mechanism upon which, higher order, top-down processes required for cognitive empathy are built [1]
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