Papers of the Week

Affiliative tactile interactions help regulate physiological arousal and confer resilience to acute and chronic stress. C-tactile afferents (CTs) are a population of unmyelinated, low threshold mechanosensitive cutaneous nerve fibres which respond optimally to a low force stimulus, moving at between 1 and 10 cm/s. As CT firing frequencies correlate positively with subjective ratings of touch pleasantness, they are hypothesised to form the first stage of encoding affiliative tactile interactions. Serotonin is a key modulator of social responses with known effects on bonding.