Centrality of touch avoidance in social touch experiences in autism

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. Using a body-painting task, we showed, for example, that 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 results by taking a multidimensional approach and exploring individual traits that might be linked to social touch processing differences in autism. For this purpose, we implemented network and moderated parallel mediation analyses considering measures of social and non-social tactile perception, social anxiety and alexithymia. Our results show that social touch avoidance is a central disposition contributing to lower levels of social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness in autistic individuals. Moreover, these mediation relationships were stronger in male participants. 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.