Social Touch and Human Development: A Plain-English Review
Touch is one of the first ways we encounter and communicate with other people. From infancy onwards, physical contact forms part of caregiving, bonding and social interaction.
This review by Cascio, Moore and McGlone explores the science of social touch across human development and considers how our nervous system processes touch that carries emotional and social meaning.
The authors bring together research from developmental psychology and neuroscience, including work on a specialised system of touch-sensitive nerve fibres known as C-tactile afferents.
What did the research find?
Our skin contains different types of sensory nerve fibres that provide the brain with information about physical contact.
Of particular interest in social-touch research are C-tactile afferents, which respond strongly to gentle, slow, stroking touch of the kind commonly found in nurturing and affiliative interactions.
This information is processed through brain systems involved not only in detecting physical sensation but also in emotion, social experience and awareness of the body's internal state.
The authors describe how touch begins playing an important role very early in life. Caregiver-infant touch occurs within a wider system of communication that includes facial expression, voice, movement and other social signals.
The meaning and experience of touch also continue to develop throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
What does this mean in practice?
This research helps us understand that touch is not simply information about pressure, temperature or movement on the skin.
Human touch can also carry social and emotional meaning.
Our experience of being touched is influenced by context, relationship, previous experience and our interpretation of what the contact means.
This is particularly relevant to body-oriented therapeutic work. Appropriate therapeutic touch takes place within a relationship and cannot be separated from factors such as consent, trust, predictability and the person's individual response to contact.
The research also provides a useful biological perspective on why gentle interpersonal touch can sometimes feel very different from purely functional or mechanical contact.
A note of caution
This paper is a review of social touch and human development, not a study of psychotherapy or a clinical trial of therapeutic touch.
Research into C-tactile afferents and social touch therefore does not demonstrate that a particular touch-based therapy can treat trauma or other psychological conditions.
The authors also describe social touch as a complex developmental process involving multiple sensory, psychological and social systems. It would be too simplistic to attribute the effects of human touch to one particular type of nerve fibre.
Its value is in showing just how deeply touch is woven into human social development and how our experience of physical contact involves considerably more than sensation at the surface of the skin.
The original research
Cascio, C. J., Moore, D. & McGlone, F. (2018). Social touch and human development. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 35, 5–11.
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