Personality-related individual differences in touch appraisal

Abstract

Touch plays a pivotal role in early development and throughout the lifespan, and is therefore an important research subject. The study of touch may be especially important in certain mental illnesses such as somatoform disorder, where tactile thresholds are indicated to be deviant from normal. The present study examined the influence of extraversion and neuroticism on the pleasantness rating of affective and non-affective touch. Extraversion and neuroticism have been suggested to modulate emotional experience and emotion processing and might therefore also influence affective touch perception. Extraversion is known to correlate with the experience of positive emotions and was therefore hypothesized to have a positive influence on affective touch perception. On the other hand, neuroticism, which is associated with sensitivity to negative emotions, was hypothesized to have a negative influence on non-affective touch. Pleasantness ratings were obtained during low - affective touch - and high - non-affective touch - velocity stroking to the hands and forearms. Sixty-four participants were assessed using the Big Five Inventory. Subsequently, they were affectively and non-affectively stimulated whereupon they scored this experience. Affect appraisals were correlated with extraversion and neuroticism levels. The present data led to rejection of the hypotheses, showing no influence of extraversion and neuroticism on the pleasantness rating of touch. Perhaps affective and non-affective touch are so crucial in normal development that individual differences in personality hardly affect touch perception in healthy participants. Future research should examine the possible influence of extraversion and neuroticism on more positive and more negative touch stimuli, and in psychiatric populations. Keeping in mind that findings cannot be generalized to other experimental situations or other groups, the present study indicates that the appraisal of affective and non-affective touch is not related to personality characteristics.