Distinct and distributed brain responses to emotions communicated through touch

Human-to-human touch, ranging from loving caresses to attention-seeking tapping, powerfully communicates emotional states. Yet, we only are beginning to understand the neural mechanisms behind our ability to recognize emotions communicated through touch. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in emotionally close participant pairs to examine the neural basis of human-to-human tactile emotion recognition. In each pair, participants were assigned the roles of sender and receiver. The receiver was placed in the fMRI scanner, and the sender was cued to communicate six different emotional states by touching the receiver’s arm using improvised intuitive gestures. A multivoxel pattern classification analysis was applied to decode the cued emotional states from the receivers’ brain responses. We found that the classifiers could decode the communicated emotions from both globally and locally distributed brain response patterns, including from brain regions previously associated with auditory and visual emotion recognition. Classifier performance correlated positively with the empathic tendencies of the senders, but not of the receivers. These findings provide the first evidence that emotion communication through touch yields distinct brain responses and emphasize the cross-modal nature of emotion recognition in the brain. The findings also suggest that empathic capacity of the sender plays a key role in successful intuitive touch communication. In addition to highlighting the relevance and potential of the tactile system in social communication, this study provides further support for the embodiment theory of emotions.