ArticlePloS one2014
Touch satiety: differential effects of stroking velocity on liking and wanting touch over repetitions.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Defining pleasant touch stimuli: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychological research · 2021Pooled it
- Trial
- Effects of opioid receptor stimulation and blockade on touch pleasantness: a double-blind randomised trial.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Trial
- Rapid and Unpredictable Shifts in Perceived Pleasantness of Continuous Affective Touch.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Cross-species translational paradigms for assessing positive valence system as defined by the RDoC matrix.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Review
- Social and non-social feedback stimuli lead to comparable levels of reward learning and reward responsiveness in an online probabilistic reward task.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Valenced tactile information is evoked by neutral visual cues following emotional learning.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Role of medial prefrontal cortex and primary somatosensory cortex in self and other-directed vicarious social touch: a TMS study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Prior Methamphetamine Use Disorder History Does Not Impair Interoceptive Processing of Soft Touch in HIV Infection.Viruses · 2021Article
- Effects of Appetitive and Aversive Motivational States on Wanting and Liking of Interpersonal Touch.Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Quantifying noxious-evoked baseline sensitivity in neonates to optimise analgesic trials.eLife · 2021Observational
- Robotic Stroking on the Face and Forearm: Touch Satiety and Effects on Mechanical Pain.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Gentle touch perception: From early childhood to adolescence.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
- Exposure shapes the perception of affective touch.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
- Emotional visual stimuli affect the evaluation of tactile stimuli presented on the arms but not the related electrodermal responses.Experimental brain research · 2018Article
- Neural hypersensitivity to pleasant touch in women remitted from anorexia nervosa.Translational psychiatry · 2018Article
- Slow touch targeting CT-fibres does not increase prosocial behaviour in economic laboratory tasks.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Stroking and tapping the skin: behavioral and electrodermal effects.Experimental brain research · 2018Article
- The right touch: Stroking of CT-innervated skin promotes vocal emotion processing.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A slow, gentle caress of the skin is a salient hedonic stimulus. Low threshold, unmyelinated C-tactile afferents fire preferentially to this type of touch, where slow (<1 cm/s) and fast (>10 cm/s) stroking velocities produce lower firing frequencies and are rated as less pleasant. The current aim was to investigate how the experience of tactile pleasantness changes with repeated exposure (satiety to touch). A further aim was to determine whether tactile satiety varied with different stroking velocities. The experimental paradigm used a controlled brush stroke to the forearm that was delivered repeatedly for ∼ 50 minutes. In Experiment 1, brush strokes were administered at three different velocities (0.3 cm/s, 3 cm/s and 30 cm/s), which were presented in a pseudo-randomised order. In Experiment 2, brush strokes were applied using only one velocity (either 3 or 30 cm/s). After each stroke, the participants rated both subjective pleasantness (liking) and wanting (the wish to be further exposed to the same stimulus) for each tactile sensation. In Experiment 1, both pleasantness and wanting showed a small, but significant, decrease over repetitions during stroking at 3 cm/s only, where the mean values for pleasantness and wanting were similar. Conversely, slower (0.3 cm/s) and faster (30 cm/s) stroking showed no decrease in ratings over time, however pleasantness was rated higher than wanting. In Experiment 2, both pleasantness and wanting showed a significant decrease over repetitions for both applied velocities, with a larger decrease in ratings for stroking at 3 cm/s. In conclusion, satiety to touch occurred with a slow onset and progression, where pleasantness and wanting ratings to stroking at 3 cm/s were affected more than at the slower or faster velocities. Tactile satiety appears to differ compared to appetitive and olfactory satiety, because the hedonic and rewarding aspects of touch persist for some time.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.