Centrality of Touch Avoidance in Social Touch Experiences in Autism.
Autistic adults rate social touch as less pleasant mainly because they generally avoid touch, especially autistic males.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mello et al. (2025) asked adults with and without autism to rate how pleasant or erotic different kinds of social touch feel.
They also measured each person’s general attitude toward avoiding touch. Then they used network math to see if avoidance best explains why autistic adults rate the touches lower.
What they found
Autistic adults said social touch felt less nice and less erotic than neurotypical adults did.
The difference was almost completely explained by how much each person dislikes touch in general. The link was strongest in autistic males.
How this fits with other research
O Miguel et al. (2017) showed that kids with autism who are over- or under-reactive to touch have more social problems. Manuel’s team now shows the same theme carries into adulthood, but the key factor is attitude, not raw sensitivity.
Sala et al. (2020) found that autistic adults value the same romantic closeness as neurotypicals. Manuel adds that touch-avoidance attitude can still make that closeness harder to enjoy.
Pitchford et al. (2019) reported that autistic females face higher risk of unwanted sexual experiences. Manuel’s sex-moderated results hint that males may avoid touch while females may endure it, pointing to different intervention targets.
Why it matters
If a client pulls away from hugs, handshakes, or playful touch, the issue may not be the sensory input itself but a learned or ingrained attitude that touch is bad. You can test this quickly with a 5-item avoidance scale. When avoidance is high, start by pairing brief, client-chosen touch with strong reinforcers before jumping to social-skills drills. Targeting attitude first may boost comfort and keep relationships from stalling.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
PURPOSE: 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. For instance, 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 findings by taking a multidimensional approach and exploring individual traits that might be linked to social touch processing differences in autism. METHODS: We implemented exploratory network analysis and moderated parallel mediation analyses considering measures of attitudes towards social touch, non-social touch sensitivity, social anxiety, and alexithymia. We investigated how these individual dispositions might impact group differences in social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness, and evaluated how sex assigned at birth might moderate these relationships. RESULTS: Both exploratory and confirmatory analysis approaches converged in showing that one's attitude toward social touch represents a central disposition contributing to lower levels of social touch erogeneity, pleasantness, and appropriateness in autistic individuals. Moreover, these mediation relationships were stronger in autistic male participants. CONCLUSION: These results pave the way for a deeper, more targeted investigation of the structure and dy namics underlying the relationships between social touch processing differences in autism and specific individual dispositions. Moreover, they bring about new evidence on how the sex of the receiver might influence such social touch experiences.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1016/S0301-0511(01)00113-2