  Inter-personal touch is a powerful aspect of social interaction that we
expect to be particularly important for emotional communication. We studied the
capacity of closely acquainted humans to signal the meaning of several word
cues (e.g. gratitude, sadness) using touch sensation alone. Participants
communicated all cues with above chance performance. We show that emotionally
close people can accurately signal the meaning of different words through
touch, and that performance is affected by the amount of contextual information
available. Even with minimal context and feedback, both attention-getting and
love were communicated surprisingly well. Neither the type of close
relationship, nor self-reported comfort with touch significantly affected
performance.
