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...

Human skin is innervated with different tactile afferents, which are found at varying densities over the body. We investigate how the relationships between tactile pleasantness, sensitivity and discrimination differ across the skin. Tactile pleasantness was assessed by stroking a soft brush over the skin, using five velocities (0.3, 1, 3, 10, 30 cm s(-1)), known to differentiate hedonic touch, ...

Six unfamiliar foods were introduced to children (8-11 years old, n=72) who responded (yes/no) to questions as to whether they (1) had earlier seen, (2) had earlier tasted, (3) were willing to try, and (4) actually tried each food when given the opportunity. Pleasantness (if not tasted, expected pleasantness) of the foods was also rated. Children who wanted to try a food and tasted it, rated it...

Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted w...

In the last few years, the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction has grown significantly. For a continued se of these systems, the interface must be reliable and pleasant in order to provide an optimal user experience. However there are urrently very few studies that try to evaluate how pleasant is a voice from a perceptual point of view when the final application s a s...

The present study reports normative ratings for 200 food and non-food odors. One hundred participants rated odors across measures of verbalisability, perceived descriptive ability, context availability, pleasantness, irritability, intensity, familiarity, frequency, age of acquisition, and complexity. Analysis of the agreement between raters revealed that four dimensions, those of familiarity, i...

The temperature of foods and fluids is a major factor that determines their pleasantness and acceptability. Studies of nonhuman primates have shown that many neurons in cortical taste areas receive and process not only chemosensory inputs, but oral thermosensory (temperature) inputs as well. We investigated whether changes in oral temperature activate these areas in humans, or middle or posteri...

The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in Psychology, Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Review. We then examined the as...

INTRODUCTION Infant body odor is subjectively pleasant to parents and activates reward areas in the brain. Hence, body odor perception might contribute to parental bonding. However, it is unknown whether the perceived pleasantness of children's body odor varies over the course of a child's development. METHODS Two hundred and thirty-five parents (M = 36.9 years, SD = 7.3) were asked to assess...