Validation and psychometric properties of the Russian version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ-37 Rus)

It has been demonstrated that nurturing and affiliative touch is essential for human emotional and physical well-being throughout our entire life. Within the last 30 years a system of low-threshold mechanosensitive C fibers innervating the hairy skin was discovered and described; this system is hypothesized to represent the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch. This discovery opens new perspectives for multidisciplinary research of the role of affiliative social touch in health and disease, and calls for establishing novel psychometric tools assessing individual differences in the domain of affective touch. The main objective of the study was to construct and validate a Russian version of the Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire (TEAQ), a self-report measure recently developed to quantify individual experience and attitude to social and affective touch. A pool of 117 items was translated into Russian and all the items were assessed for appropriateness for Russian culture (232 participants). After exploring the factor structure (468 participants), we composed a 37-item questionnaire (TEAQ-37 Rus) characterized by good reliability and a clear 5-factor structure, covering the aspects of attitude to intimate touch, attitude to friendly touch, attitude to self-care, current intimate touch experiences, and childhood touch experiences. Confirmatory factor analysis (551 participants) has demonstrated good consistency and reliability of the 5-factor structure of the TEAQ-37 Rus. Cross-validation research demonstrated moderate positive correlations between predisposition to social touch and emotional intelligence; positive correlations with extraversion and openness facets of the Big Five personality model were also found. As predicted, participants with higher TEAQ-37 Rus scores rated all observed kinds of touch as more pleasant, with a particular preference for slow touch. We anticipate that this questionnaire will be a valuable tool for researchers of social touch, touch perception abnormalities, and the importance of touch experiences for emotional and mental health.

已有研究证实，贯穿整个人生周期，抚育性与亲和性触摸对人类的情绪与躯体健康均至关重要。近30年来，学界发现并描述了一类支配有毛皮肤的低阈值机械敏感性C纤维系统，该系统被假设为触摸的情感奖赏属性的神经生物学基础。这一发现为探究亲和性社会触摸在健康与疾病中的作用开辟了多学科研究新视角，并呼吁开发用于评估情感触摸领域个体差异的新型心理测量工具。本研究的核心目标为编制并验证触摸体验与态度问卷（Touch Experiences and Attitudes Questionnaire, TEAQ）的俄语版——该自评量表为新近开发，用于量化个体对社会与情感触摸的体验及态度。研究人员首先编制了包含117个条目的初始题库并将其译为俄语，随后招募232名被试对所有题项的俄语文化适配性进行评估。在对468名被试的因子结构进行探索后，最终形成了包含37个条目的问卷（TEAQ-37 Rus），该量表具备良好的信度，且拥有清晰的五因子结构，涵盖亲密触摸态度、友好触摸态度、自我关怀、当前亲密触摸体验以及童年期触摸体验五个维度。对551名被试的验证性因子分析结果表明，TEAQ-37 Rus的五因子结构具备良好的一致性与信度。交叉验证研究显示，社会触摸倾向与情绪智力呈中等程度正相关；同时也发现其与大五人格模型中外向性与开放性维度呈正相关。正如研究预期，TEAQ-37 Rus得分更高的被试认为所有类型的触摸均更令人愉悦，尤其偏好慢速触摸。本研究团队预计，该问卷将成为社会触摸、触摸感知异常以及触摸体验对情绪与心理健康重要性相关领域研究者的实用工具。