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Updated: Oct 11, 2025

Using Facial Electromyography to Assess Facial Muscle Reactions to Experienced and Observed Affective Touch in Humans
Published on: March 15, 2019
Affective regulation through touch: homeostatic and allostatic mechanisms
Aikaterini Fotopoulou1, Mariana von Mohr2, Charlotte Krahé3
1Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
None:
We focus on social touch as a paradigmatic case of the embodied, cognitive, and metacognitive processes involved in social, affective regulation. Social touch appears to contribute three interrelated but distinct functions to affective regulation. First, it regulates affects by fulfilling embodied predictions about social proximity and attachment. Second, caregiving touch, such as warming an infant, regulates affect by socially enacting homeostatic control and co-regulation of physiological states. Third, affective touch such as gentle stroking or tickling regulates affect by allostatic regulation of the salience and epistemic gain of particular experiences in given contexts and timescales. These three functions of affective touch are most likely mediated, at least partly, by different neurobiological processes, including convergent hedonic, dopaminergic and analgesic, opioidergic pathways for the attachment function, 'calming' autonomic and endocrine pathways for the homeostatic function, while the allostatic function may be mediated by oxytocin release and related 'salience' neuromodulators and circuits.
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