Social interoception and social allostasis through touch: Legacy of the Somatovisceral Afference Model of Emotion

ABSTRACT

John Cacioppo and colleagues’ Somatovisceral Afference Model of Emotion (SAME) highlighted the importance of interoception in emotional experience. Here we compare how the SAME and the more recent theory of constructed emotion (TCE) view the role of interoceptive signals in creating emotional experiences. We describe the characteristics of touch sensations that are carried by thin, unmyelinated fibers called C-tactile afferents (CTs) to the posterior insula, and are thus deemed interoceptive despite their typically social (external) origin. We explore how this social interoceptive input might contribute to the emotion-related effects of social touch more generally, and speculate that all social touch, with or without CT afferent stimulation, can directly influence allostasis, or the predictive regulation of short- and long-term energy resources required by the body. Finally, we describe several features of CT-optimal touch that make it a potentially useful tool to help illuminate basic interoceptive mechanisms, emotion-related phenomena, and disorders involving atypical affect or somatosensation. These proposed ideas demonstrate the long intellectual reach of John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson’s highly productive scientific collaboration, which was formative for the fields of social neuroscience, social psychophysiology, and affective neuroscience.

KEYWORDS:

• Somatovisceral afference
• emotion
• interoception
• allostasis
• psychological construction
• social touch
• C-tactile afferent

Acknowledgments

Work by KSQ on this manuscript was supported by grant W911NF-16-1-0191 from the Army Research Institute, and NIH grants R01MH113234 and 1U01CA193632-01A1.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While it is not a main focus of this paper, the fundamental impact of social connection on human physiology and behavior was another major research topic for Cacioppo, Berntson, and colleagues.

² Although our emphasis is on the potential social functions of CT afferent stimulation, we recognize that CTs are likely also to be important in nonsocial contexts.

³ Although not fully developed here, we recognize the crucial importance of the meaning or interpretation by the internal model of social touch experiences within individual, interpersonal, societal, and cultural contexts.

⁴ Here, we do not address social touch during gestation, because the meaning of “social” changes at birth.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences [W911NF-16-1-0191];National Institutes of Health [1U01CA193632-01A1,R01MH113234].