A randomized placebo-controlled trial with behavioral, neuroimaging, and physiological measures reveals that oxytocin treatment facilitates pleasure and brain reward responses only to gentle stroking social touch by increasing peripheral blood concentrations.

Touch-mediated social interactions in human females elicited endogenous oxytocin and brain responses in a covariant manner, and these changes were modulated by the familiarity of the person delivering touch as well as the recent history of social interaction.

Snout-to-snout contact modulates the response of rat auditory cortex to calls from other animals, indicating that the multisensory nature of social interaction is directly represented in the rat brain.

Administration of dopamine and opioid receptor antagonists resulted in reduced reward anticipation (effort and increased negative facial reactions), but only administration of opioid antagonists resulted in reduced liking (facial reactions).

Affectionate touch in everyday life is linked to lower self-reported burden and is associated with higher endogenous oxytocin levels during times of prolonged stress.

A novel naturalistic environment with a touchscreen enables high-quality eye tracking for studying visual cognition in monkeys, and allows naive monkeys to learn complex tasks through a combination of social observation of trained monkeys and trial-and-error learning.

Lesion analyses in right hemisphere stroke patients reveal the crucial role of the right anterior and posterior insula in the perception of affective touch.

Using novel approach to study real-time social interactions shows that mutual action visibility facilitates static and dynamic coordination in both species, but whereas humans employ dynamic turn-taking to equalize rewards, macaques, after training with a human, compete between themselves.

How the body and brain respond to a gentle stroke dynamically changes depending on how familiar someone is with the other person.

Close friend quantity is nonlinearly associated with various mental health and cognitive outcomes in children and could be partly explained by the structure of the social brain and the endogenous opioid system.