Highlights•Social, affective regulation, including through touch, is multidimensional.•Social
touch appears to have three interrelated functions in affective regulation.•Social touch …

Comforting touch involves contact distress-alleviating behaviors of an observer towards the
suffering of a target. A growing number of studies have investigated the effects of touch on …

Social touch has positive effects on social affiliation and stress alleviation. However, its
ubiquitous presence in human life does not allow the study of social touch deprivation 'in the …

We offer a scientific approach to the philosophical 'hard problem'of consciousness, as
formulated by David Chalmers in this journal. Our treatment is based upon two recent …

In the past 2 decades, interoception has received increasing attention in the fields of
psychology and cognitive science, as well as neuroscience and physiology. A plethora of …

Interoception includes signals from inner organs and thin afferents in the skin, providing
information about the body's physiological state. However, the functional relationships …

Osteopathy is a person-centred healthcare discipline that emphasizes the body's structure-
function interrelationship—and its self-regulatory mechanisms—to inform a whole-person …

This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of
pain experience in terms of what we will call 'embodied predictive processing'. The …

Pain is modulated by social context. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that romantic
partners can provide a potent form of social support during pain. However, such studies …

While interoception is of major neuroscientific interest, its precise definition and delineation
from exteroception continue to be debated. Here, we propose a functional distinction …