The emotional responses to the sounds of organic affective tactile gestures

Affective touch offers numerous benefits for touchers and touchees, including emotional regulation. However, individuals are engaging in affective touch increasingly less, in part due to the digitalization of experiences, which motivates the question of whether the emotional benefits of affective touch can be conveyed in alternative ways, such as through different sensory modalities. With this in mind, we investigated the emotional responses to the auditory signals produced by organic affective touch gestures. In particular, participants in our five online experiments evaluated different sounds resulting from touch gestures performed by real romantically involved dyads. Experiment 1 provided an overview of the organic affective touch space. Experiment 2 revealed that, lacking explicit cues about the nature of the sounds, organic affective touch sounds elicited emotional responses with reduced positivity, similar to those evoked by object-based interaction sounds. Moreover, we found that individuals were unable to confidently identify whether the sounds involved affective touch gestures. Experiment 3 revealed that framing organic affective touch sounds explicitly as real affective touch, rather than as object-based tactile interactions, elicited more positive emotional responses. Experiment 4 revealed that greater congruence between individuals’ expectations of the sounds of affective touch and the actual auditory cues positively influenced the valence elicited by the sounds. Experiment 5 replicated the effects of framing on the valence of elicited responses with a more salient experimental manipulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of affective touch and underscore the importance of meaning in the construction of its emotional space.