Social touch during development: Long-term effects on brain and behavior.

In this paper, our goal is to explore what is known about the role of social touch during development. We first address the neural substrates of social touch and the role of tactile experience in neural development. We discuss natural variation in early exposure to social touch, followed by a discussion on experimental manipulations of social touch during development and "natural experiments", such as early institutionalization. We then consider the role of other developmental and experiential variables that predict social touch in adults. Throughout, we propose and consider new theoretical models of the role of social touch during development on later behavior and neurobiology.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

• Publication date

  2018-12-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2018.09.019PMID 30278194
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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