ArticleJournal of autism and developmental disorders2025
Centrality of Touch Avoidance in Social Touch Experiences in Autism.
Article in Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Surrogate bias: Behavioral and physiological effects of seeing ingroup and outgroup virtual agents touching one's embodied avatar.Computers in human behavior reports · 2026Article
- Autistic adults prefer social touch less but engage just as much: The impact of social context, relationship type, sensory responsivity, and psychological factors.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeSocial touch is ubiquitous in social species, and it represents an important driving force of human development. Mounting evidence suggests that social touch may be perceived and processed differently in autistic and neurotypical individuals. For instance, feelings of erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness of social touch throughout the whole body and in different contexts were reported to be overall lower by autistic adults, compared with a non-autistic sample, and that participants' sex modulated these feelings differently in the two groups. Here, we expand on these findings by taking a multidimensional approach and exploring individual traits that might be linked to social touch processing differences in autism.
methodsWe implemented exploratory network analysis and moderated parallel mediation analyses considering measures of attitudes towards social touch, non-social touch sensitivity, social anxiety, and alexithymia. We investigated how these individual dispositions might impact group differences in social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness, and evaluated how sex assigned at birth might moderate these relationships.
resultsBoth exploratory and confirmatory analysis approaches converged in showing that one's attitude toward social touch represents a central disposition contributing to lower levels of social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness in autistic individuals. Moreover, these mediation relationships were stronger in autistic male participants.
conclusionThese results pave the way for a deeper, more targeted investigation of the structure and dy namics underlying the relationships between social touch processing differences in autism and specific individual dispositions. Moreover, they bring about new evidence on how the sex of the receiver might influence such social touch experiences.
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Registered trials
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