Bodily Experience Shapes Evaluative Judgements and Attentional Engagement with Affective Touch in Art
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Affective touch plays a central role in social interactions by conveying emotion and interpersonal closeness. Yet little is known about whether differences in bodily experience following upper-limb amputation are associated with the emotional, evaluative, and attentional processing of observed affective touch. Across two pre-registered experiments, we examined the extent to which affective touch in art shapes emotional, aesthetic, and attentional engagement, and whether these responses differ following upper-limb amputation. In Experiment 1, artworks depicting touch evoked more positive and intense emotional responses than artworks not depicting touch, with little evidence for a difference in aesthetic appreciation. In Experiment 2, artworks depicting touch received higher ratings across all three measures compared to those not depicting touch, with the amputation group showing greater sensitivity to depicted touch in judgements of aesthetic appreciation than controls. Artworks depicting touch were also fixated later and viewed for less time than artworks not depicting touch, with comparable effects across groups. Furthermore, within artworks depicting touch, the upper region of paintings (depicting facial information) was fixated earlier and viewed for longer than the middle region of paintings (featuring more arm and torso information), suggesting preferential visual attention to socially informative body content. These findings demonstrate that observed affective touch in art carries emotional and aesthetic value beyond direct tactile experience. They further highlight that limb loss selectively reshapes the aesthetic evaluation of touch, rather than its emotional or attentional processing. Together, this work advances our understanding of observed touch by demonstrating that its social-affective meaning, aesthetic importance, and attentional prioritisation are partly dissociable, and that bodily experience selectively shapes its evaluation.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221163924