Discriminative and Affective Touch: Sensing and Feeling

The multimodal properties of the human somatosensory system continue to be unravelled. There is mounting evidence that one of these submodalities—touch—has another dimension, providing not only its well-recognized discriminative input to the brain, but also an affective input. It has long been recognized that touch plays an important role in many forms of social communication and a number of theories have been proposed to explain observations and beliefs about the “power of touch.” Here, we propose that a class of low-threshold mechanosensitive C fibers that innervate the hairy skin represent the neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch

Neuron 2014