Recognizing movements and emotions when substituting social touch with auditory signals
Résumé
Touch allows communicating emotions in a way specific to this sensory modality. Hence, in the case of isolation or social distancing, it would be useful to provide social touch signals through another sense. Two experiments investigated the extent to which this would be feasible. The vibratory signals from skin-to-skin touches were recorded with a violin microphone and amplified by means of basic sensory signal processing. In the first experiment, participants had to categorize the sounds corresponding to different social touches (i.e., stroking, rubbing, tapping, and hitting). In the second experiment, participants had to categorize the emotional intention (i.e., love, empathy, joy, impatience, fear, anger) underlying auditorily displayed social touches. The results revealed an overall high accuracy, suggesting audio-touch to be an effective mean to convey both the informational and emotional contents of social touch. Future research will investigate the extent to which audio-touch can elicit emotional responses in their listeners.