Does Mediated Social Touch Succesfully Approximate Natural Social Touch?

Mediated social touch (MST) devices are upcoming. To date, experiments
aimed at demonstrating whether effects of naturalistic social touch can be replicated with MST provide mixed findings. A possible explanation could be a lack of realism of current haptic displays in combination with not sufficiently taking contextual factors of social touch into account. Using a qualitative approach, our study aims to gain more insight into the influence of contextual effects on the experience of an MST, by means of exploring female participants’ experiences of receiving an MST from a male stranger versus their romantic partner. Our findings show that simultaneously feeling and seeing the touch act performed on a corporeal object can be beneficial for the MST experience. However, our findings also demonstrate that it is not self-evident to regard MST as phenomenologically equal to natural social touch, as it often fails to meet the expectations people have formed based on naturalistic social touch.