Abstract
Pleasant touch is a perceptive-emotional concept with particular biological significance in skin-to-skin contact with conspecifics. It has been demonstrated in the last decades that human hairy skin is supplied by unmyelinated tactile afferents (CT) which are equally sensitive to light touch as the large tactile Aβ-afferents, although the response characteristics of the two types of tactile afferents differ in most other respects. Particularly, the CT-afferents lack the coding precision and consistency required for discriminative touch. Functional properties of the CT-afferents, as well as psychophysical and fMRI responses to selective CT-activation, support the affective touch hypothesis, that is, the interpretation that the essential role of the CT-system is to convey affective aspects of light touch.
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