Figure 1
Experimental design: time course of an experimental trial. The emotional picture depicted in the figure is in public domain (from https://pixabay.com/) and is used here for illustrating purpose only. We performed two experiments that varied according to the tested sensory modality of social contact (auditory in the first experiment and tactile in the second experiment). In each experiment, we compared a condition where trials were primed by social contact with two control conditions. In the first experiment, participants were exposed to the sound of their own first name, another unfamiliar name, or white noise, before seeing an emotional picture in response to which they had to rate the intensity of their bodily reaction. In the second experiment, participants were exposed to a human touch, a brush touch, or no-touch, before seeing the emotional picture. The participants’ SCR to the emotional pictures was recorded concomitantly and we computed the correlation between the SCR amplitude and the participant’s rating on a trial-by-trial basis, in each experimental condition for each experiment. For a quarter of the trials, there was an additional, secondary memory task at the end of the trial: a screen display was presented after the participant’s response to the main task, requiring the participant to indicate which context stimulus (Experiment 1: Own Name, Other Name, or Noise; Experiment 2: Human Touch, Brush Touch, or No Touch) had been presented at the beginning of the trial.
