NTU, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme (Neuroscience)
Cameron is a current PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme (IGP) – Neuroscience. Previously, he also attained his Bachelor’s degree (BSocSci (Hons)) majoring in Psychology in Nanyang Technological University. Throughout his undergraduate years, he had explored various topics in neuroscience including haptics perception, animal executive function and clinical biomarkers in Alzheimer’s Disease. His current research interests continue to surround the topics in cognitive neuroscience, specifically visual-haptics integration, neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI, PET) and emotion perception.
Perceiving Emotions through Social Touch
Emotion perception plays a vital role in social communication. We perceive emotion through various sensory and perceptual cues. While these cues can be conveyed through different sensory and perceptual modalities, most investigations on emotional perception have focused on visual and auditory cues. Research on other cues such as haptic cues has been relatively scarce. This critical gap in the literature therefore overlooks the unique and nuanced contributions of haptic cues that may offer insights beyond visual or auditory information to emotion perception. In addition, studies have yet to investigate similar phenomena within the context of research conducted in Singapore, underscoring a significant cultural gap in our understanding of this area. To address these research gaps, we conducted a within-subjects experimental study and recruited 41 unacquainted toucher-receiver pairs to investigate the communication and perception of emotions through touch. Specifically, we documented the expression of 12 different emotions by touchers, and the accuracy rates of receivers in interpreting these expressions when visually occluded from each other. Binomial tests of accuracy revealed that most of Ekman’s basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear and disgust) and prosocial emotions (sympathy, gratitude, love) were correctly perceived above categorical chance levels (p’s < .01). In contrast, sadness, surprise and other self-focused emotions (envy, pride, embarrassment) were detected at chance (p’s > .05). Moreover, a confusion matrix analysis (χ2 = 394.72, p < .001) revealed that the expression of happiness, fear and embarrassment tended to be perceptually confused with other emotions (p’s < .05). Together, these results expand on previous findings by ascertaining that social touch can be used to communicate specific emotions, such as basic emotions and prosocial emotions. Our findings shed light on the understanding of emotion perception in social communication through the tactile modality.