Abstract
It has been demonstrated that nurturing and affiliative touch is essential for human emotional and physical well-being throughout our entire life. Within the last 30 years a system of low-threshold mechanosensitive C fibers innervating the hairy skin was discovered and described; this system is hypothesized to represent the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch. This discovery opens new perspectives for multidisciplinary research of the role of affiliative social touch in health and disease, and calls for establishing novel psychometric tools assessing individual differences in the domain of affective touch. The main objective of the study was to construct and validate a Russian version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ), a self-report measure recently developed to quantify individual experience and attitude to social and affective touch. A pool of 117 items was translated into Russian and all the items were assessed for appropriateness for Russian culture (232 participants). After exploring the factor structure (468 participants), we composed a 37-item questionnaire (TEAQ-37 Rus) characterized by good reliability and a clear 5-factor structure, covering the aspects of attitude to intimate touch, attitude to friendly touch, attitude to self-care, current intimate touch experiences, and childhood touch experiences. Confirmatory factor analysis (551 participants) has demonstrated good consistency and reliability of the 5-factor structure of the TEAQ-37 Rus. Cross-validation research demonstrated moderate positive correlations between predisposition to social touch and emotional intelligence; positive correlations with extraversion and openness facets of the Big Five personality model were also found. As predicted, participants with higher TEAQ-37 Rus scores rated all observed kinds of touch as more pleasant, with a particular preference for slow touch. We anticipate that this questionnaire will be a valuable tool for researchers of social touch, touch perception abnormalities, and the importance of touch experiences for emotional and mental health.
Highlights
Affective touch throughout human lifeCommunication via the sense of touch has long been perceived as an important aspect of human social interaction
Items containing explicit questions on intimate life were excluded as inappropriate, as 68% of participants of the Study 1 sample considered them to be inadmissible for wide use in a questionnaire for Russian culture (e.g., Q30, “I enjoy the physical intimacy of sexual foreplay”; Q57, “I enjoy having sex”)
The principal component analysis repeated for Study 3 sample corresponded very closely to the results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); the same five components were observed as for Study 2 sample: Attitude to Friendly Touch (AFT), Childhood Touch (ChT), Attitude to Self-Care (ASC), Current Intimate Touch (CIT), and Attitude to Intimate Touch (AIT)
Summary
Affective touch throughout human lifeCommunication via the sense of touch has long been perceived as an important aspect of human social interaction. The work of Meaney [12] provided further evidence that rat pups receiving high levels of licking and grooming touch in the early neonatal period have significantly lower stress responses, an effect which prevails to adulthood: adult offsprings with increased licking-grooming show lower responses to stress [13]. This protecting effect of maternal touch has been replicated in humans: a copious amount of maternal stroking can reverse the potentially harmful epigenetic effects induced by prenatal maternal depression followed by postnatal maternal depression [14]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
