Touching the unseen: Exploring affective responses to haptic stimuli with and without visual input

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Sensory Science

Background:

• The sense of touch is crucial for human experience, impacting emotions and social interactions.
• Previous research on texture and emotion primarily focused on stimulus discrimination, leaving emotional aspects less explored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To map haptic and visuo-haptic stimuli onto a valence-arousal affective space.
• To compare affective representations of unimodal and bimodal stimuli.
• To test if haptic stimuli support core affect theory and share affective representations.

Main Methods:

• Reanalysis of existing data using multivariate methods.
• Application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) and classification analyses.
• Mapping tactile stimuli onto a two-dimensional affective space (valence and arousal).

Main Results:

• Multidimensional scaling revealed that roughness and hardness corresponded to valence and arousal, supporting core affect theory.
• Classification analyses showed that both haptic and visuo-haptic stimuli were predictable from tactile and emotion scales.
• Cross-condition classification demonstrated accurate prediction of tactile properties from visuo-haptic ratings and vice versa.

Conclusions:

• Findings provide empirical evidence for modality-general representations of affective and haptic responses.
• Highlights the interconnectedness of sensory processing and emotional experiences.
• Suggests shared neural mechanisms underlying tactile perception and emotional responses.