Purpose

Social touch is ubiquitous in social species, and it represents an important driving force of human development. Mounting evidence suggests that social touch may be perceived and processed differently in autistic and neurotypical individuals. For instance, feelings of erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness of social touch throughout the whole body and in different contexts were reported to be overall lower by autistic adults, compared with a non-autistic sample, and that participants’ sex modulated these feelings differently in the two groups. Here, we expand on these findings by taking a multidimensional approach and exploring individual traits that might be linked to social touch processing differences in autism.

Methods

We implemented exploratory network analysis and moderated parallel mediation analyses considering measures of attitudes towards social touch, non-social touch sensitivity, social anxiety, and alexithymia. We investigated how these individual dispositions might impact group differences in social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness, and evaluated how sex assigned at birth might moderate these relationships.

Results

Both exploratory and confirmatory analysis approaches converged in showing that one’s attitude toward social touch represents a central disposition contributing to lower levels of social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness in autistic individuals. Moreover, these mediation relationships were stronger in autistic male participants.

Conclusion

These results pave the way for a deeper, more targeted investigation of the structure and dynamics underlying the relationships between social touch processing differences in autism and specific individual dispositions. Moreover, they bring about new evidence on how the sex of the receiver might influence such social touch experiences.