Assessing affective touch in early caregiving: Development and validation of the Caregiver-Child Affective Touch Assessment (CCATA)
Abstract
Affective touch plays a pivotal role in nonverbal communication between caregivers and young children, supporting the development of emotion regulation and socioemotional functioning. This exploratory study examines the initial development and validation of the Caregiver-Child Affective Touch Assessment (CCATA), an observational measure designed to classify the quality of caregiver touch during interactions with children aged 2 to 5 years. Thirty mother-child dyads were observed during two structured tasks, generating 1,066 coded instances of touch. Inter-rater reliability was very good, with intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from 0.86 to 0.94. An exploratory principal component analysis suggested a three-component structure of maternal touch, reflecting regulatory/controlling, interactive/pragmatic, and affective/spontaneous dimensions. These dimensions reflect distinct caregiving strategies and communicative functions of touch. The CCATA also revealed significant associations with both maternal emotional availability and the use of disciplinary strategies. These findings support the CCATA as a reliable and theoretically grounded instrument for capturing the complexity of affective touch in early caregiving. Its application holds promise for both research and clinical interventions focused on caregiver-child relationships. Future studies should further examine the measure’s factorial structure, cross-cultural validity, and predictive value in developmental outcomes.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., Markese, S., Buck, K., Chen, H., Cohen, P., Bahrick, L., Andrews, H., & Feldstein, S. (2010). The origins of 12-month attachment: A microanalysis of 4-month mother-infant interaction. Attachment & Human Development, 12(1-2), 3-141. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616730903338985
Beebe, B., Steele, M., Jaffe, J., Buck, K. A., Chen, H., Cohen, P., Kaitz, M., Markese, S., Andrews, H., Margolis, A., & Feldstein, S. (2011). Maternal anxiety symptoms and mother-infant self‐ and interactive contingency. Infant Mental Health Journal, 32(2), 174-206. https://doi.org/10.1002/imhj.20274
Biringen, Z. (2008). The Emotional Availability (EA) scales and the Emotional Attachment & Emotional Availability (EA2) clinical screener (4th ed.). International Center for Excellence in Emotional Avaibility. http://www.emotionalavailability.com
Capistrano, C. G., Grande, L. A., McRae, K., Phan, K. L., & Kim, P. (2022). Maternal socioeconomic disadvantage, neural function during volitional emotion regulation, and parenting. Social Neuroscience, 17(3), 276-292. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2022.2082521
Carnevali, L., Della Longa, L., Dragovic, D., & Farroni, T. (2024). Touch and look: The role of affective touch in promoting infants’ attention towards complex visual scenes. Infancy, 29(2), 271-283. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12580
Cascio, C. J., Moore, D., & McGlone, F. (2019). Social touch and human development. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 35, 5-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2018.04.009
Charbonneau, J. A., Santistevan, A. C., Raven, E. P., Bennett, J. L., Russ, B. E., & Bliss-Moreau, E. (2024). Evolutionarily conserved neural responses to affective touch in monkeys transcend consciousness and change with age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(18), e2322157121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2322157121
Crucianelli, L., Wheatley, L., Filippetti, M. L., Jenkinson, P. M., Kirk, E., & Fotopoulou, A. (Katerina). (2019). The mindedness of maternal touch: An investigation of maternal mind-mindedness and mother-infant touch interactions. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 35, 47-56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2018.01.010
Erickson, M. F., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (1985). The relationship between quality of attachment and behavior problems in preschool in a high-risk sample. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50(1/2), 147. https://doi.org/10.2307/3333831
Feldman, R. (2007). Parent-infant synchrony: Biological foundations and developmental outcomes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(6), 340-345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00532.x
Feldman, R. (2012a). Parenting behavior as the environment where children grow. In L. Mayes & M. Lewis (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of environment in human development (pp. 535-567). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016827.031
Feldman, R. (2012b). Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans. Hormones and Behavior, 61(3), 380-391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2012.01.008
Feldman, R., Singer, M., & Zagoory, O. (2010). Touch attenuates infants physiological reactivity to stress. Developmental Science, 13(2), 271-278. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00890.x
Ferber, S. G., Feldman, R., & Makhoul, I. R. (2008). The development of maternal touch across the first year of life. Early Human Development, 84(6), 363-370. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2007.09.019
Field, T. (2010). Touch for socioemotional and physical well-being: A review. Developmental Review, 30(4), 367-383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2011.01.001
Gordon, I., Voos, A. C., Bennett, R. H., Bolling, D. Z., Pelphrey, K. A., & Kaiser, M. D. (2013). Brain mechanisms for processing affective touch. Human Brain Mapping, 34(4), 914-922. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.21480
Hertenstein, M. J. (2002). Touch: Its communicative functions in infancy. Human Development, 45(2), 70-94. https://doi.org/10.1159/000048154
Jean, A. D. L., & Stack, D. M. (2009). Functions of maternal touch and infants’ affect during face-to-face interactions: New directions for the still-face. Infant Behavior and Development, 32(1), 123-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.09.008
Kaiser, H. F. (1974). An index of factorial simplicity. Psychometrika, 39(1), 31-36. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02291575
Loman, M. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2010). Early experience and the development of stress reactivity and regulation in children. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 34(6), 867-876. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.05.007
McGlone, F., Uvnäs Moberg, K., Norholt, H., Eggart, M., & Müller-Oerlinghausen, B. (2024). Touch medicine: Bridging the gap between recent insights from touch research and clinical medicine and its special significance for the treatment of affective disorders. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 15, e1390673. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1390673
McGlone, F., Wessberg, J., & Olausson, H. (2014). Discriminative and affective touch: Sensing and feeling. Neuron, 82(4), 737-755. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.05.001
McLaren, D., Gao, J., Yin, X., Reis Guerra, R., Vyas, P., Morton, C., Cang, X. L., Chen, Y., Sun, Y., Li, Y., Madden, J. D. W., & MacLean, K. E. (2024). What is affective touch made of? A soft capacitive sensor array reveals the interplay between shear, normal stress and individuality. In L. Yao, M. Goel, A. Ion, & P. Lopes (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (article 52, pp. 1-31). https://doi.org/10.1145/3654777.3676346
Montirosso, R., & McGlone, F. (2020). The body comes first. Embodied reparation and the co-creation of infant bodily-self. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 113, 77-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.03.003
Morrison, I., Löken, L. S., & Olausson, H. (2010). The skin as a social organ. Experimental Brain Research, 204(3), 305-314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-2007-y
Negrão, M., Pereira, M., Soares, I., & Mesman, J. (2014). Enhancing positive parent-child interactions and family functioning in a poverty sample: A randomized control trial. Attachment & Human Development, 16(4), 315-328. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2014.912485
Nikolaeva, E. I., Dydenkova, E. A., Mayorova, L. A., & Portnova, G. V. (2024). The impact of daily affective touch on cortisol levels in institutionalized & fostered children. Physiology & Behavior, 277, e114479. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2024.114479
Paradis, G., & Koester, L. S. (2015). Emotional availability and touch in deaf and hearing dyads. American Annals of the Deaf, 160(3), 303-315. https://doi.org/10.1353/aad.2015.0026
Pawling, R., McGlone, Francis., & Walker, S. C. (2024). High frequency heart rate variability is associated with sensitivity to affective touch. Physiology & Behavior, 283, e114600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2024.114600
Pederson, D. R., Moran, G., Sitko, C., Campbell, K., Ghesquire, K., & Acton, H. (1990). Maternal sensitivity and the security of infant-mother attachment: A Q-Sort Study. Child Development, 61(6), 1974-1983. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1990.tb03579.x
Pereira, M., Negrão, M., Soares, I., Almeida, A. T., & Machado, C. (2009). [Portuguese short-version of the Family Risks and Strengths Profile]. Unpublished raw data.
Reece, C., Ebstein, R., Cheng, X., Ng, T., & Schirmer, A. (2016). Maternal touch predicts social orienting in young children. Cognitive Development, 39, 128-140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.05.001
Rodríguez, G., Camacho, J., Rodrigo, M. J., & Martín, J. C. (2006). Evaluación del riesgo psicosocial en familias usuarias de servicios sociales municipales. Psicothema, 18, 200-206.
Scott, M. G., Smiley, P. A., Ahn, A., Lazarus, M. F., Borelli, J. L., & Doan, S. N. (2022). A mother’s touch: Preschool-aged children are regulated by positive maternal touch. Developmental Psychobiology, 64(2), e22243. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.22243
Stack, D. M., & Muir, D. W. (1992). Adult Tactile Stimulation during Face-to-Face Interactions Modulates Five-Month-Olds’ Affect and Attention. Child Development, 63(6), 1509-1525. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131572
Tuulari, J. J., Scheinin, N. M., Lehtola, S., Merisaari, H., Saunavaara, J., Parkkola, R., Sehlstedt, I., Karlsson, L., Karlsson, H., & Björnsdotter, M. (2019). Neural correlates of gentle skin stroking in early infancy. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 35, 36-41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2017.10.004
Verschueren, K., Dossche, D., Marcoen, A., Mahieu, S., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. (2006). Attachment representations and discipline in mothers of young school children: An observation study. Social Development, 15(4), 659-675. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9507.2006.00363.x
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14417/ap.2216
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Nº ERC: 107494 | ISSN (in print): 0870-8231 | ISSN (online): 2182-2980 | Copyright © ISPA - CRL, 2012 | Rua Jardim do Tabaco, 34, 1149-041 Lisboa | NIF: 501313672 | This work is published under a license Creative Commons CC BY-NC
