As part of SomAffect’s developing collaboration with Anton Varlamov & Galina Protnova at the Russian Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology, Francis McGlone & Adarsh Makdani were recently invited to help establish a Microneurography lab in Moscow. The first series of experiments proved extremely promising, and included Read more…
SomAffect’s research with collaborators into gentle touch in premature infants has been featured in an article by the NewScientist by Linda Geddes. While many premature babies experience pain, McGlone thinks that it is exposure to gentle touch that really matters. There’s mounting evidence that a set of nerves called c-tactile Read more…
CT afferents are receptors in mammalian hairy skin that fire action potentials when the skin is touched lightly which makes them particularly important in affective touch. Traditionally neuroscientific research has focused on more discriminative and haptic properties of touch that are mediated by large myelinated afferents and the coding properties and functional organization of unmyelinated CT afferents have been studied much less. The proposed volume will draw together existing knowledge in this nascent field. Separate sections will address (1) how we can measure affective touch, (2) CT structure and physiology, (3) CT processing, (4) the contribution of CTs to sexual behavior, (5) clinical relevance, (6) commercial relevance, and (7) future research considerations. (more…)
On 13th September 2016, SomAffect’s Francis McGlone will be speaking at a workshop held at University of California, Irvine.
Register at: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkrichma/haptics_workshop.html
Research by SomAffect’s Francis McGlone appears in this month’s SFARI newsletter.
“The brains of people with autism respond differently to a gentle brush on the arm — a form of social touch — than do those of people without the disorder, according to a study published 5 June in Cerebral Cortex”
““I find it very exciting,” says Kamila Markram, Autism Project director at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, who proposed the intense world theory in 2007. The new study supports the idea that sensory overload is a key biomarker of autism.”
Research by SomAffect’s Francis McGlone & Susannah Walker, along with our collaborators, has been featured in an in-depth article about the “Social Power Of Touch” within the July 2015 issue of Scientific American Mind (£).
This week Ralph, Paula and myself will be presenting posters at the annual BPS conference , in Liverpool. One of the key topics at the conference this year is the social brain. This will be an excellent opportunity for members of our group to showcase our work in CT afferents Read more…
Francis McGlone, and research by SomAffect & Collaborators, are featured in article about The Touch That Made You printed in the 28th February 2015 edition of New Scientist (£).
The inaugural congress of the International Association for the Study of Affective Touch (IASAT) will be held at University College London, on 20-22 March 2015.
SANG’s Francis McGlone is part of the organising committee, and will be speaking at the meeting. (more…)
