Primates are Touched by Your Concern: Touch, Emotion, and Social Cognition in Chimpanzees.
Abstract
There is something important about the way human primates use touch in social encounters; for example, consider greetings in airports (hugs vs. handshakes) and the way children push each other in a playground (a quick push to warn, a really hard one when it is serious!). Human primates use touch as a way of conveying a wide range of social information. In this chapter I will argue that one of the best ways of understanding social cognition in non-human primates is through touch. Moreover, I will argue that if we would like to describe the evolutionary history of social cognition, touch is one of the ideal modes to operationalize social interaction across different kinds of primates.