ScienceDaily — A nuzzle of the neck, a stroke of the wrist, a brush of the knee -- these caresses often signal a loving touch, but can also feel highly aversive, depending on who is delivering the touch, and to whom. Interested in how the brain makes connections between touch and emotion, neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered that the association begins in the brain's primary somatosensory cortex, a region that, until now, was thought only to respond to basic touch, not to its emotional quality.
The new finding is described in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS).
The team measured brain activation while self-identified heterosexual male subjects lay in a functional MRI scanner and were each caressed on the leg under two different conditions. In the first condition, they saw a video of an attractive female bending down to caress them; in the
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