The greater the emotional bond, however, the larger the bodily area open for touching.īut it’s more complicated than that, some experts say. Interestingly, frequency of social contact with an individual did not predict the areas designated for preferred or acceptable touching. “Taboo zones, where touching was not allowed, included the genitals for extended family and males in family, acquaintances and strangers, as well as the buttocks for males in extended family, acquaintances and strangers.” “The partner was allowed to touch basically anywhere over the body, closest acquaintances and relatives over the head and upper torso, whereas strangers were restricted to touch only the hands,” the authors wrote. They were asked to color in the bodily regions where each individual in their social network would be allowed to touch them. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom showed 1,368 participants front and back silhouettes of human bodies, with words designating members of their social network, such as family, friends, acquaintances and strangers. And women were allowed to touch more areas of the body than men. And men are more comfortable being touched by a woman than by another man.īut then, men feel more comfortable being touched by strangers than by women. Perhaps not so surprising, women are more at ease with being touched than men. After a series of experiments to determine where, and by whom, people are most comfortable being touched, researchers made some surprising, and some intuitively obvious, findings, recently published in the medical journal PNAS.

Wife gets touched by stranger