Interpersonal touch is a significant part of human social life. It has been well-documented that touch facilitates individuals' behaviour in the context of compliance and spontaneous helping behaviour towards the touch initiator. The current project had its aim to extend previous research and investigate the role of touch on helping behaviour in a situation of social exclusion. In a laboratory setting, it was expected that socially excluded participants who were briefly touched by a researcher would volunteer for more experiments than socially excluded participants who were not touched. The effect of touch on helping behaviour was predicted to be mediated by positive emotions.

Facial expressions of the participants were videotaped during the experiment. The emotion coding was performed with the help of two coders, naive to the hypotheses of the study. Increasing evidence suggests that facial coding by naïve coders may be as valid as highly trained coders (e.g. Baker, Haltigan, Brewster, Jaccard & Messinger, 2010; Dondi et al 2007). Studies indicate that untutored raters concur remarkably in their judgments of the personality and affective traits of complete strangers. When judgments are pooled, naïve raters exhibit high consensual accuracy and are able to predict important aspects of interpersonal functioning (Albright, Kenny, & Malloy, 1988; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992, 1993; Paunonen, 1991; Rosenthal, Blanck, & Vannicelli, 1984). Basic emotions that can be reliably identified by untrained coders are happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972). The coders were asked to rate a participant on these 6 emotions and to evaluate the intensity of the participant’s display of the emotions. It was expected that the participants who went through the social exclusion manipulation would exhibit more negative emotions, than the participants in the control condition and the inclusion condition. Moreover, it was hypothesized that the participants who were touched by the researcher would display more positive emotions than not touched participants.  The results of the current study could have important implications for mitigating the consequences of social exclusion and increasing  prosocial behaviours.

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Com o objetivo de aumentar a investigação direcionada para o cumprimento dos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável para 2030 das Nações Unidas, é disponibilizada no Ciência-IUL a possibilidade de associação, quando aplicável, dos projetos científicos aos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Estes são os Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável identificados para este projeto. Para uma informação detalhada dos Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável, clique aqui.