Touch plays a significant role in human social behavior and social communication, and its rewarding nature has been suggested to involve opioids. Opioid blockade in monkeys leads to increased solicitation and receipt of grooming, suggesting heightened enjoyment of touch. We sought to study the role of endogenous opioids in perception of affective touch in healthy adults and in patients with fib...

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model system for understanding the genetics and physiology of touch. Classical assays for C. elegans touch, which involve manually touching the animal with a probe and observing its response, are limited by their low throughput and qualitative nature. We developed a microfluidic device in which several dozen animals are subject to spatially l...

Self-touch is considered important for bodily self-consciousness and self-other distinction has been reported to improve clinical symptoms of disembodiment. To investigate the link between self-touch disembodiment in healthy participants, we studied effect versus touch produced by another person (other-touch) on experimentally induced In a mixed reality paradigm, across two experiments, partici...

EDITORIAL article Front. Comput. Sci., 27 July 2023Sec. Human-Media Interaction Volume 5 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2023.1255784