ArticleScientific reports2021
Physical correlates of human-like softness elicit high tactile pleasantness.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- First-person visual perspective enhances audiovisual synchrony effects in autonomous sensory meridian response.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Atypical tactile preferences in autism spectrum disorder: Reduced pleasantness responses to soft objects resembling human body parts.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2025Article
- The Impact of Task Context on Pleasantness and Softness Estimations: A Study Based on Three Touch Strategies.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Touching soft materials slows affective visual processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- SORI: A softness-rendering interface to unravel the nature of softness perception.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words for Representing the Hardness of an Object Are Judged Similarly by Japanese and English Speakers.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Touching an object can elicit affective sensations. Because these sensations are critical for social interaction, tactile preferences may be adapted to the characteristics of the human body. We have previously shown that compliance, a physical correlate of softness, increased the tactile pleasantness of a deformable surface. However, the extent to which object compliance similar to the human body elicits tactile pleasantness remains unknown. We addressed this question by using a wide range of compliances and by measuring the distribution of compliance of human body parts. The participants numerically estimated the perceived pleasantness or softness while pushing tactile stimuli with their right index fingers. The perceived softness monotonically increased with increasing compliance and then leveled off around the end of the stimulus range. By contrast, pleasantness showed an inverse U pattern as a function of compliance, reaching the maximum between 5 and 7 mm/N. This range of compliance was within that for both hand and arm. These results indicate that objects with similar compliance levels as those of human body parts yield the highest pleasantness when pushing them.
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