Stroke me for longer this touch feels too short: The effect of pleasant touch on temporal perception

Negative, painful, somatosensory stimulation lengthens the perceived duration of time. However, to date, no research has explored the influence of positive, pleasant, somatosensory stimulation on temporal perception. Here we asked whether gentle stroking touch influences perceptions of duration. Pleasant (gentle) and mildly unpleasant (rough) tactile stimulation was delivered whilst participants estimated the duration of a neutral visual stimulus. Pleasant touch resulted in shorter estimates of duration than unpleasant touch. There was no difference in duration perception in the unpleasant and control conditions. Taken together with the results of previous research (Ogden, Moore, Redfern, & McGlone, 2015), the results of this study suggest that pleasant and painful somatosensory stimulation have opposing effects on temporal perception, and additionally that pleasant touch can alter aspects of perceptual and attentional processing outside the purely affective domain.

[1]  U. Sailer,et al.  Touch Satiety: Differential Effects of Stroking Velocity on Liking and Wanting Touch Over Repetitions , 2014, PloS one.

[2]  A. Craig,et al.  Emotional moments across time: a possible neural basis for time perception in the anterior insula , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[3]  R. Ogden.  The effect of facial attractiveness on temporal perception , 2013, Cognition & emotion.

[4]  J. Wessberg,et al.  Unmyelinated afferents constitute a second system coding tactile stimuli of the human hairy skin. , 1999, Journal of neurophysiology.

[5]  J. Wessberg,et al.  Functional role of unmyelinated tactile afferents in human hairy skin: sympathetic response and perceptual localization , 2007, Experimental Brain Research.

[6]  Stephan Eliez,et al.  Amygdalar activation associated with positive and negative facial expressions , 2002, Neuroreport.

[7]  R. Ragot,et al.  How emotional auditory stimuli modulate time perception. , 2007, Emotion.

[8]  Hermann Ackermann,et al.  The contribution of the insula to motor aspects of speech production: A review and a hypothesis , 2004, Brain and Language.

[9]  J H Wearden,et al.  Task switching and subjective duration , 2010, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[10]  A. Angrilli,et al.  The influence of affective factors on time perception , 1997, Perception & psychophysics.

[11]  M. Wittmann.  The inner experience of time , 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[12]  L. Dunsany.  Beyond the Fields We Know , 1972 .

[13]  Yvonne Neudorf.  Beyond The Fields We Know , 2016 .

[14]  J. Leonard,et al.  The effect of friendly touch on delay-of-gratification in preschool children , 2014, Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[15]  A. Craig.  How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body , 2002, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[16]  E T Rolls,et al.  Representations of pleasant and painful touch in the human orbitofrontal and cingulate cortices. , 2003, Cerebral cortex.

[17]  R. D. Hare.  The estimation of short temporal intervals terminated by shock. , 1963, Journal of clinical psychology.

[18]  H. Critchley,et al.  Interoception and emotion. , 2017, Current opinion in psychology.

[19]  R M Church,et al.  Scalar Timing in Memory , 1984, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[20]  S. Droit-Volet,et al.  Emotional time distortions: The fundamental role of arousal , 2012, Cognition & emotion.

[21]  S. Rauch,et al.  Response and Habituation of the Human Amygdala during Visual Processing of Facial Expression , 1996, Neuron.

[22]  P. Niedenthal,et al.  BRIEF REPORT Perception of the duration of emotional events , 2004 .

[23]  J. Wessberg,et al.  Coding of pleasant touch by unmyelinated afferents in humans , 2009, Nature Neuroscience.

[24]  G. Essick,et al.  Quantitative assessment of pleasant touch , 2010, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

[25]  J. Wearden,et al.  The effect of alcohol administration on human timing: a comparison of prospective timing, retrospective timing and passage of time judgements. , 2011, Acta psychologica.

[26]  H. Olausson,et al.  The skin as a social organ , 2010, Experimental Brain Research.

[27]  Hugo Merchant,et al.  Neural basis of the perception and estimation of time. , 2013, Annual review of neuroscience.

[28]  S. Buetti,et al.  Perceiving Control Over Aversive and Fearful Events Can Alter How We Experience Those Events: An Investigation of Time Perception in Spider-Fearful Individuals , 2012, Front. Psychology.

[29]  F. Macar,et al.  Controlled attention sharing influences time estimation , 1994, Memory & cognition.

[30]  E. Rolls,et al.  The representation of pleasant touch in the brain and its relationship with taste and olfactory areas. , 1999, Neuroreport.

[31]  S J Bolanowski,et al.  Mechanisms of attention in touch. , 1999, Somatosensory & motor research.

[32]  Francis McGlone,et al.  The effect of pain and the anticipation of pain on temporal perception: A role for attention and arousal , 2015, Cognition & emotion.

[33]  J. Wearden,et al.  “Beyond the fields we know...”: exploring and developing scalar timing theory , 1999, Behavioural Processes.

[34]  Y. Lamarre,et al.  Unmyelinated tactile afferents signal touch and project to insular cortex , 2002, Nature Neuroscience.

[35]  W. Meck,et al.  How emotions colour our perception of time , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[36]  Su-Ling Yeh,et al.  Asymmetric cross-modal effects in time perception. , 2009, Acta psychologica.

[37]  L. F. Barrett,et al.  Handbook of emotions, 2nd ed. , 2000 .

[38]  J. Wessberg,et al.  Discriminative and Affective Touch: Sensing and Feeling , 2014, Neuron.

[39]  Stephen D. Smith,et al.  The effects of valence and arousal on the emotional modulation of time perception: evidence for multiple stages of processing. , 2011, Emotion.

[40]  S. Droit-Volet,et al.  "Time flies in the presence of angry faces"… depending on the temporal task used! , 2011, Acta psychologica.

[41]  Sylvie Droit-Volet,et al.  Time perception, emotions and mood disorders , 2013, Journal of Physiology-Paris.

[42]  R. Fillingim,et al.  Sex, gender, and pain: a review of recent clinical and experimental findings. , 2009, The journal of pain : official journal of the American Pain Society.

[43]  A. Craig.  Forebrain emotional asymmetry: a neuroanatomical basis? , 2005, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[44]  E. Bigand,et al.  Music, emotion, and time perception: the influence of subjective emotional valence and arousal? , 2013, Front. Psychol..

[45]  Monica Gori,et al.  Perceived duration of Visual and Tactile Stimuli Depends on Perceived Speed , 2011, Front. Integr. Neurosci..

[46]  Edmund T. Rolls,et al.  Emotion and decision-making explained: A précis , 2014, Cortex.