In human social interaction, affective touch plays an integral role to communicate intentions and emotions. Three of the most important forms of social touch are embracing, cradling and kissing. These behaviours have been demonstrated to be lateralized, but the underlying mechanisms are still not well understood. Both motor and emotive biases have been suggested to affect laterality of social touch. We aimed to systematically investigate how motor preferences and emotive biases influence the lateralization of embracing, cradling and kissing within the same sample. Participants performed all three forms of social touch in neutral, positive and negative emotional conditions. Like a previous study, we found a rightward bias for embracing that was modulated by both motor preferences and the emotional content of the situation. Kissing and cradling were not influenced by motor preferences. In general, a negative emotional connotation of the situation led to a reduction of lateral biases in social touch, independent of the individual direction.

在人类社会互动中，情感接触在传达意图和情感方面起着不可或缺的作用。拥抱，拥抱和亲吻是三种最重要的社交方式。这些行为已被证明是横向的，但其潜在机制仍未得到很好的理解。运动和情绪偏见都被认为会影响社会交往的偏向性。我们旨在系统地研究运动偏好和情绪偏见如何影响同一样本中拥抱，拥抱和亲吻的偏侧化。参与者在中性，积极和消极的情绪条件下进行了所有三种形式的社交活动。像以前的研究一样，我们发现拥抱的向右偏见受运动偏好和情况的情绪内容所调节。亲吻和拥抱不受运动偏好的影响。通常，这种情况的负面情感内涵导致社交接触中的横向偏见减少，而与个人指导无关。