Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling.

By Francis McGlone, Johan Wessberg, Håkan Olausson. Neuron, 2014

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The multimodal properties of the human somatosensory system continue to be unravelled. There is mounting evidence that one of these submodalities-touch-has another dimension, providing not only its well-recognized discriminative input to the brain, but also an affective input. It has long been recognized that touch plays an important role in many forms of social communication and a number of theories have been proposed to explain observations and beliefs about the "power of touch." Here, we propose that a class of low-threshold mechanosensitive C fibers that innervate the hairy skin represent the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27bbcd9ba682b81e48ed4e028fe4914b37931f0c