Social touch is increasingly utilized in a variety of psychological interventions, ranging from parent-child interventions to psychotherapeutic treatments. Less attention has been paid, however, to findings that exposure to social touch may not necessarily evoke positive or pleasant responses. Social touch can convey different emotions from love and gratitude to harassment and envy, and persons’ preferences to touch and be touched do not necessarily match with each other. This review of altogether 99 original studies focuses on how contextual factors modify target person’s behavioral and brain responses to social touch. The review shows that experience of social touch is strongly modified by a variety of toucher-related and situational factors: for example, toucher’s facial expressions, physical attractiveness, relationship status, group membership, and touched person’s psychological distress. At the neural level, contextual factors modify processing of social touch from early perceptual processing to reflective cognitive evaluation. Based on the review, we present implications for using social touch in behavioral and neuroscientific research designs.

社交接触越来越多地用于各种心理干预，从亲子干预到心理治疗。然而，很少有人注意到接触社会接触不一定会引起积极或愉快的反应的发现。社交触摸可以传达不同的情感，从爱和感激到骚扰和嫉妒，人们对触摸和被触摸的偏好并不一定相互匹配。这篇对总共 99 项原始研究的回顾侧重于背景因素如何改变目标人的行为和大脑对社交接触的反应。审查表明，社交接触的体验受到各种与接触者相关的和情境因素的强烈影响：例如，接触者的面部表情、身体吸引力、关系状态、组员身份，触动了人的心理困扰。在神经层面，情境因素将社交接触的处理从早期感知处理修改为反思性认知评估。根据审查，我们提出了在行为和神经科学研究设计中使用社交接触的意义。