Investigating the impact of affiliative touch on visual emotional appraisal

Abstract

Many traditional theories of emotional appraisal hold that emotional meaning is gained only after a stimulus is relayed through the primary sensory cortices and other association areas (centralized appraisal). However, accumulating evidence from non-visual modalities show that the valence of a stimulus can be discerned the moment contact is made with the basic sensory organs (decentralized appraisal). For instance, affiliative touch (e.g., gentle stroking), signals positive affect associated with social contact and support. Critically, however, it remained unknown whether decentralized valence signals influence centralized emotional appraisal mechanisms, such as those processing emotional content from visual stimuli. This is particularly notable given the visual dominance observed throughout much of our sensory processing. The current work addressed this gap in understanding, specifically focusing on how affiliative touch influences emotional appraisal of visual information. Participants were presented with either affiliative touch, neutral touch, or no touch while viewing static images of varied emotional content and were required to rate either the visual or tactile stimuli for its valence and arousal. Affiliative touch was found to have a general influence on the perceived valence of visual stimuli without modulating arousal. However, affectively salient visual stimuli strongly influenced both valence and arousal of tactile stimuli. These findings support the sensory dominance of vision for understanding and interpreting the world, yet also suggests a supramodal influence of affective information, independent of acquisition modality. This study improves our understanding of how affectively salient stimuli from non-visual modalities influence our emotional appraisal of visual information.