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.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess emotional response to music and its EEG correlates in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Design/methodology/approach: Six musical fragments eliciting emotional states of calmness/serenity, sadness and anxiety/fear were presented to children with ASD (n=21, aged 5–9) and typically developing (TD) peers (n=21), while 19-channel EEG was recorded. Emotion self-reports were assessed using visual analogous scales. Findings: Children with ASD assessed most music fragments similarly to their TD peers, with likelihood of EEG oscillatory patterns closely corresponding to emotion self-reports. Somewhat contrary to the expectations, a major difference was observed for one fragment only, which was identified as sad by TD children and adult neurotypical raters, but found “angry and frightening” by children with ASD, with EEG oscillatory response confirming greater cortical activation, particularly for the right hemisphere. Research limitations/implications: The data suggest that children with ASD may have emotional reactions to music either similar or highly aberrant compared to TD peers, rather than having general difficulties in assessing emotions. The data should be confirmed by further studies, ideally involving high functioning adult autists. Practical implications: The findings may increase the understanding of autists’ difficulties in perceiving prosodic nuances and reading emotional cues. The results can be taken into consideration when developing music-based interventions. Originality/value: The findings show that music may be perceived by children with ASD in a unique way, which may be difficult to predict by neurotypical raters.

Tactile perception encompasses several submodalities that are realized with distinct sensory subsystems. The processing of those submodalities and their interactions remains understudied. We developed a paradigm consisting of three types of touch tuned in terms of their force and velocity for different submodalities: discriminative touch (haptics), affective touch (C-tactile touch), and knismesis (alerting tickle). Touch was delivered with a high-precision robotic rotary touch stimulation device. A total of 39 healthy individuals participated in the study. EEG cluster analysis revealed a decrease in alpha and beta range (mu-rhythm) as well as theta and delta increase most pronounced to the most salient and fastest type of stimulation. The participants confirmed that slower stimuli targeted to affective touch low-threshold receptors were the most pleasant ones, and less intense stimuli aimed at knismesis were indeed the most ticklish ones, but those sensations did not form an EEG cluster, probably implying their processing involves deeper brain structures that are less accessible with EEG.