Abstract
This study examined how cardiovascular reactivity to human touch is affected by the social context of the situation. Context for a ten-second touch was manipulated for 61 male and 64 female undergraduate participants in three ways: professional touch, where participants were touched on the wrist to have their pulse taken; social touch, an unexplained touch to the same area of the arm; and a no-touch control, where participants were told their pulse was being taken automatically without being touched. Social context was also manipulated by employing both same-sex and opposite-sex touch experimenters. In the professional touch and no-touch conditions, participants' heart rate and blood pressure decreased overall; however, in the social touch condition initial increases were observed for both measures. Female experimenters produced greater heart rate decreases than male experimenters. The greatest cardiovascular increases were found with women being touched by men in the social condition. These data suggest that both context and gender are important contextual factors in determining cardiovascular reactivity.
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Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant HD30581.
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Nilsen, W.J., Vrana, S.R. Some touching situations: The relationship between gender and contextual variables in cardiovascular responses to human touch. ann. behav. med. 20, 270–276 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02886376
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02886376