How well can we communicate emotions purely through touch?

Romantic couples outperformed pairs of strangers

Whether it’s a raised eyebrow or curl of the lip, we usually think of emotions as conveyed through facial expressions and body language. Science too has focused on these forms of emotional communication, finding that there’s a high degree of consistency across cultures. It’s only in the last few years that psychologists have looked at whether and how the emotions can be communicated purely through touch.


Thirty romantic couples (the vast majority were heterosexual) based in London took part. One partner in each romantic pair attempted to communicate 12 different emotions, one at a time, to their partner. They sat at opposite sides of a table divided by a curtained screen. The emotional ‘decoder’ slid their forearm through the curtain for the ‘encoder’ to touch, after which the ‘decoder’ attempted to identify which of the 12 emotions had been communicated. The participants were filmed throughout.



How did the romantic couples achieve their greater accuracy? They touched for longer, but this wasn’t correlated with accuracy. Using footage of the experiment, the researchers coded the types of touch used (a wide range of discrete touch types were identified, from trembling and scratching to slapping and squeezing), and for each emotion it was clear that strangers were using similar kinds of touch as were romantic couples. This means that there were either subtle differences in the touching used by romantic couples, which the experimenters had failed to detect, or the ‘decoders’ were interpreting the same touch cues differently when they were delivered by an intimate partner.

This topic is ripe for further investigation – for example, does the touch advantage shown by romantic couples extend to non-emotional communication? Would other long-term, but non-sexual, relationship partners such as siblings, show a similar advantage? And would romantic partners still display an advantage if they didn’t know who was doing the touching? ‘Our findings extend the literature on the communication of emotion,’ the researchers said. ‘The nature of particular relationships appears to have the ability to diminish the ambiguity of emotional expression via touch.’



3 thoughts on “How well can we communicate emotions purely through touch?”

  1. Interesting, but I honestly don't understand how something like this can be published.

    “This created an unfortunate confound” … sorry, every student would have told you that with this design the results are not interpretable. You could have just as well not done this study.

    Again, the idea is interesting, but this is such a major factor!

    Oh boy. And there were so many ways around this! Let the people touch each other anonymously in a group for 2 hours, or give them thin gloves, etc. pp.



  2. Dear Anonymous,

    It is always easier to criticise with hindsight.
    Please credit the researchers for, a) conceiving the study, b) conducting the study, c) acknowledging its limitations and d) informing us of their study.

    Also, I would like to acknowledge the publishers for publishing the study in spite of its limitations so as to take the field forward.

    I would be interested in knowing the potential practical implications of such studies. Development of a tactile language for non-verbal expression of emotions for the blind is one that comes to mind.

    Many thanks.


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