The Importance of Contextual Grounding in Affective Mediated Touch

We explore the effect of contextual grounding in amplifying the conveyance of social information via mediated touch. We implemented two touch modalities for 6 emotion-based scenarios to capture a broader spectrum of haptic feedback: normal indentation and skin-slip. Participants were provided emotional touch cues with no context and were asked to report their perceived emotional state, and then repeated the same process while receiving prompts of the scenario alongside the touch cues. Our user study (N=20) reveals that contextual grounding significantly enhances (p < 0.01) the participants' ability to discern emotions.