Interpersonal touch as a resource to facilitate positive personal and relational outcomes during stress discussions

Dissociable routes for personal and interpersonal visual enhancement of touch

Seeing a hand can enhance tactile acuity on the hand, even when tactile stimulation is not visible. This visual enhancement of touch (VET) occurs both when participants see their own hand (personal VET), and when they see another person's hand (interpersonal VET). Interpersonal VET occurs irrespective of where the viewed hand appears, while personal VET is eliminated when visual and propriocept...

Virtual Interpersonal Touch 1 Virtual Interpersonal Touch: Expressing and Recognizing Emotions through Haptic Devices

The current work examines the phenomenon of Virtual Interpersonal Touch (VIT), people touching one another via force-feedback haptic devices. As collaborative virtual environments become utilized more effectively, it is only natural that interactants will have the ability to touch one another. In the current work, we used relatively basic devices to begin to explore the expression of emotion th...

Matchmaker: Interpersonal Touch in Gaming

Acts of interpersonal touch – a touch shared between two people – are used by couples to communicate in a simple and emotionally intimate way. In this paper, we argue that the intimacy afforded by acts of interpersonal touch can be used in computer entertainment to support enjoyable and engaging activities for couples. To support this notion, we have developed Matchmaker; a two-player, cooperat...

Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments

Virtual Interpersonal Touch and Digital Chameleons

We studied the characteristics of hand touch with a mechanical device that approximated a handshake, and we then examined the effect of handshake mimicry on assessment of a partner. Two participants interacted with a force-feedback joystick that recorded each of their hand movements individually. The two participants then greeted one another by feeling the recording of the other person’s moveme...