From Affective Touch to Caregiver–Infant Contact: A Systematic Review of Conceptualisation, Operationalisation, and Intervention Translation in Early Development
(2026) PSYP01 20261Department of Psychology
- Abstract
- Affective touch is widely implicated in infant regulation, relational experience, and development, but the evidence supporting these accounts has been generated through diverse empirical approaches. This systematic review examined how affective touch was conceptualised, operationalised, and measured in early-development research, what recurrent empirical configurations emerged, and where correspondence between different representations was directly established. PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus were searched using broad terms for affective or maternal touch and infant or caregiver contexts. Following staged screening and refinement, 76 studies were included. Study-specific terminology and methods were first extracted in detail and then recoded... (More)
- Affective touch is widely implicated in infant regulation, relational experience, and development, but the evidence supporting these accounts has been generated through diverse empirical approaches. This systematic review examined how affective touch was conceptualised, operationalised, and measured in early-development research, what recurrent empirical configurations emerged, and where correspondence between different representations was directly established. PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus were searched using broad terms for affective or maternal touch and infant or caregiver contexts. Following staged screening and refinement, 76 studies were included. Study-specific terminology and methods were first extracted in detail and then recoded using common analytical dimensions to map the evidence structure. Three dominant operational traditions emerged: parameter-specific controlled tactile stimulation, behavioural-relational caregiver touch, and skin-to-skin contact/kangaroo care and early-contact exposure. Structured tactile interventions formed a smaller applied configuration, while eight bridge/mixed studies directly combined elements otherwise concentrated in separate traditions. The traditions also differed in timescale and population context, and direct overlap between them was limited. The review therefore found that affective-touch research is organised around locally coherent but only partially connected empirical representations. These representations are not interchangeable: each makes different properties of touch observable and supports different kinds of inference. Clarifying their boundaries and the empirical relations between them can strengthen cross-tradition synthesis and provide a more defensible basis for translating affective-touch evidence into caregiving and intervention contexts. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9250673
- author
- Di, Weixi LU
- supervisor
-
- Elia Psouni LU
- Yunhwan Kim LU
- organization
- course
- PSYP01 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- affective touch, caregiver–infant interaction, skin-to-skin contact, evidence synthesis, early development
- language
- English
- id
- 9250673
- date added to LUP
- 2026-09-11 14:20:43
- date last changed
- 2026-09-11 14:20:43
@misc{9250673,
abstract = {{Affective touch is widely implicated in infant regulation, relational experience, and development, but the evidence supporting these accounts has been generated through diverse empirical approaches. This systematic review examined how affective touch was conceptualised, operationalised, and measured in early-development research, what recurrent empirical configurations emerged, and where correspondence between different representations was directly established. PsycINFO, PubMed, and Scopus were searched using broad terms for affective or maternal touch and infant or caregiver contexts. Following staged screening and refinement, 76 studies were included. Study-specific terminology and methods were first extracted in detail and then recoded using common analytical dimensions to map the evidence structure. Three dominant operational traditions emerged: parameter-specific controlled tactile stimulation, behavioural-relational caregiver touch, and skin-to-skin contact/kangaroo care and early-contact exposure. Structured tactile interventions formed a smaller applied configuration, while eight bridge/mixed studies directly combined elements otherwise concentrated in separate traditions. The traditions also differed in timescale and population context, and direct overlap between them was limited. The review therefore found that affective-touch research is organised around locally coherent but only partially connected empirical representations. These representations are not interchangeable: each makes different properties of touch observable and supports different kinds of inference. Clarifying their boundaries and the empirical relations between them can strengthen cross-tradition synthesis and provide a more defensible basis for translating affective-touch evidence into caregiving and intervention contexts.}},
author = {{Di, Weixi}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{From Affective Touch to Caregiver–Infant Contact: A Systematic Review of Conceptualisation, Operationalisation, and Intervention Translation in Early Development}},
year = {{2026}},
}