Decoding Social Touch: The Influence of Tactile Sensitivity, Gender, and Culture

Social touch plays a vital role in human development and general well-being. However, it remains unclear how the bottom-up role of tactile perception (i.e. detecting and discriminating stimuli) shapes our experience of social touch, alongside top-down contextual factors such as gender and culture. Using vibrotactile psychophysics and a novel social touch paradigm in two cross-cultural cohorts (56 adults in the UK; 21 adults in Singapore), we found that poorer tactile discrimination in both cohorts was associated with lower pleasantness ratings for social touch and higher pleasantness ratings for non-social touch. Strong gender effects demonstrated that female participants rated different-gender touch as less pleasant than males. Singaporean participants also showed lower preferences for social touch than UK participants. Our results highlight a bottom-up perceptual mechanism in driving context-dependent preference for touch. These findings could have implications for clinical conditions characterised by altered sensory and social processing, such as autism.