Influence of odors on pleasant touch perception

该项目旨在研究气味对愉悦触觉感知的影响。愉快的触摸是一种非常基本的感觉，适用于各种社会关系，尤其是亲密伴侣和孩子。编码愉悦触觉感知的感觉神经元被称为c -触觉传入。这些神经元位于人类多毛的皮肤上，对无害的机械刺激作出反应，并且在愉快的触摸时最活跃，正如微神经摄影研究所显示的那样。c -触觉编码触摸感知即使在长时间的刺激下也非常稳健。我想弄清楚触觉的愉悦感是如何被气味调节的。众所周知，气味是强大的情感激发剂。它们很容易影响情绪，可以传递他人情绪状态的信息，并在择偶中发挥重要作用。因此，我假设气味会影响对愉悦触觉的感知。为此进行了两项研究：一项心理物理实验和一项功能磁共振研究。在这两项研究中，参与者都受到一个具有c触觉相关触觉的机器人的刺激，在此之前会有三种不同的气味：令人作呕的气味；一个是愉快的，一个是中性的，用于控制目的。在心理物理实验中，参与者被要求对感知到的触觉愉悦度进行评分，在功能磁共振成像研究中，研究人员分析了编码气味和触觉相互作用的大脑区域的激活情况。因此，该项目将导致对令人愉悦的触觉和嗅觉的感官整合的理解。此外，我希望它能打开一扇门，让我们更好地理解伴随愉悦触觉感知障碍而来的心身疾病，比如强迫症、饮食失调或自闭症。

The project aims to study the influence of odors on pleasant touch perception. Pleasant touch is a very basic sensation with implications for all kind of social relationships, especially to intimate partners and to children. The sensory neurons that code pleasant touch perception are called C-tactile afferents. Those neurons are located in human hairy skin and respond to innocuous, mechanical stimuli and are most vigorously activated by pleasant touch, as microneurography studies could show. C-tactile coded touch perception is very robust even for long times of stimulation. I want to determine how the perception of touch as being pleasant can be modulated by odors. It is known that odors are powerful emotion elicitors. They are easily able to influence mood, can carry information about the emotional state of others and play an important role in mate choice. Therefore, I hypothesize that odors influence the perception of pleasant touch.Two studies are carried out to examine this: a psychophysical experiment and an fMRI Study. In both studies the participants are stimulated by a robot with C-tactile relevant touch, which is preceded by three different kinds of odors: a disgusting one; a pleasant one and a neutral one for control purpose. For the psychophysical experiment the participants are asked to rate the perceived pleasantness of the touch, for the fMRI study the activation of brain areas coding the interaction of odor and touch is analyzed. In result, the project will lead to an understanding of sensory integration of pleasant touch and olfaction. Furthermore, I hope it opens the door to a better understanding of psychosomatic diseases that go along with disturbance in pleasant touch perception, like obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorder or autism.