Asymmetries in social touch—motor and emotional biases on lateral preferences in embracing, cradling and kissing

ABSTRACT

In human social interaction, affective touch plays an integral role to communicate intentions and emotions. Three of the most important forms of social touch are embracing, cradling and kissing. These behaviours have been demonstrated to be lateralized, but the underlying mechanisms are still not well understood. Both motor and emotive biases have been suggested to affect laterality of social touch. We aimed to systematically investigate how motor preferences and emotive biases influence the lateralization of embracing, cradling and kissing within the same sample. Participants performed all three forms of social touch in neutral, positive and negative emotional conditions. Like a previous study, we found a rightward bias for embracing that was modulated by both motor preferences and the emotional content of the situation. Kissing and cradling were not influenced by motor preferences. In general, a negative emotional connotation of the situation led to a reduction of lateral biases in social touch, independent of the individual direction.

KEYWORDS:

• Social neuroscience
• emotion
• lateralization
• social touch
• affective touch

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the DFG Research Training Group “Situated Cognition” (GRK 2185/1) and the BMBF Grant 01DR17005. The authors thank Gina Grimshaw for her support. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and substantially improving the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung [grant number 01DR17005]; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number GRK 2185/1].