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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Social touch at a distance: Recognizing tactile gestures and their emotional content through auditory signals

Résumé

Social touch allows communicating specific emotions and intentions and has been shown to be crucial for development and well-being. Furthermore, a decrease in socio-tactile interactions is linked to higher anxiety and feeling of loneliness. Thus, with the increase of social isolation and distant communication, it appears timely to allow distant affective interactions. Skin-to-skin tactile interactions create vibrations that are of similar nature to auditory ones, suggesting the possibility for tactile signals to be transposed into auditory signals. To investigate if tactile gestures and their emotional content can be recognized through the auditory channel, the vibratory signals from prototypical skin-to-skin touches were recorded with a violin microphone and amplified by means of basic sensory signal processing. In a first experiment, participants listened to the sounds corresponding to different skin-to-skin touches (i.e., stroking, rubbing, tapping, hitting). They were found to be able to recognize and correctly categorize them. In a second experiment, participants were presented with the sounds corresponding to six skin-to-skin touches conveying different emotional intentions (i.e., love, sympathy, joy, attention, impatience, fear, anger). They were able to recognize and categorize them into different emotional messages. Additional control experiments were run with similar gestures but different non-human surfaces. Our study shows for the first time that both skin-to-skin tactile gestures and their emotional content can be recognized through their auditory counterparts. This line of research sets up the grounds for future possibilities to allow socio-affective interactions at a distance.
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Dates et versions

hal-04304892 , version 1 (24-11-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04304892 , version 1

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Malika Auvray, Alexandra de Lagarde, Louise P Kirsch, Catherine Pelachaud. Social touch at a distance: Recognizing tactile gestures and their emotional content through auditory signals. Festival of Touch, Rochelle Ackerley, Jul 2023, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-04304892⟩
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