Abstract
Affective Touch is characterized by both emotional and arousing dimensions that rely on specific features of a gentle human caress. In this study, we investigated whether and how both the nature of the touching effector (Human hand vs. Artificial hand) and touch type (Dynamic vs. Static) influenced the participants’ pupil dilation and their subjective experience during tactile stimulation. We observed that when participants received a dynamic touch, their pupil dilation increased more when the touch was promoted by a human compared to an artificial hand. This discrimination was not present for static touch. Also, dynamic touch promoted by a human hand invoked a supralinear enhancement of pupil dilation indicating that the combination of these two features induced a stronger autonomic activation than the summed effects of each separately. Moreover, this specific type of touch was perceived as the most pleasant compared to all other tactile stimulations. Overall, our results suggest that pupil dilation could map the pleasant experience of human-to-human tactile interactions, supporting the notion that the autonomic nervous system encodes the emotional and hedonic aspects associated with Affective Touch as a complex and holistic social experience, rather than solely responding to its low-level sensory properties.