A fundamental study on the measurement of emotional change induced by human’s touch

Abstract

A particular pattern of human-to-human touch reduces stress of a human and makes a human’s feeling comfortable. The human-to-human touch is used for therapy of psychological disorders recently. Although it is known that hand temperature, touch speed, and visual information affect the comfort of the touched person in human-to-human touch, it is not clear how the magnitude of these parameters affects the comfort of the touched person. The final goal of this study is to clarify the combination of the magnitude of these parameters which maximize the comfort of touched parson. As a fundamental study of this final goal,we examined the effectiveness of a method for measuring changes in human emotion induced by touch using changes in pupil diameter.