Data set demonstrating an absence of touch effects on social orienting in adults

Forty-five women participated in a variant of the social orienting paradigm employed in “Maternal Touch Predicts Attentional Bias Towards Faces in Young Children” (Reece, in press) [1]. On a given trial, they saw a mathematical equation and indicated whether this equation was true or false. Equations were superimposed on face or house distractors. A female experimenter sat next to the participant. In separate blocks, she either rested her hand on the participants arm or refrained from touching. Performance was poorer on trials with face than house distractors. However, experimenter touch failed to modulate this effect. Here we present raw and analyzed data of this companion experiment.


a b s t r a c t
Forty-five women participated in a variant of the social orienting paradigm employed in "Maternal Touch Predicts Attentional Bias Towards Faces in Young Children" (Reece, in press) [1]. On a given trial, they saw a mathematical equation and indicated whether this equation was true or false. Equations were superimposed on face or house distractors. A female experimenter sat next to the participant. In separate blocks, she either rested her hand on the participants arm or refrained from touching. Performance was poorer on trials with face than house distractors. However, experimenter touch failed to modulate this effect. Here we present raw and analyzed data of this companion experiment.
& 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Subject area
Psychology More specific subject area

Child Development
Type of data The paradigm employed by [1] is effective in producing a social orienting effect in adults. The data comprises mean response times for each participant and condition. The data presented here can be employed for individual statistical and meta-analysis.

Data
We present response time means computed for each participant and condition. In the table provided, the column "Image" refers to whether the distractor was a face or a house. The column "Touch" refers to whether the participant was or was not being touched by the experimenter. Response times are expressed in milliseconds.

Experimental design, materials and methods
We piloted the paradigm employed by [1] with 48 adult female participants. Three participants were excluded because they failed to follow instructions (N ¼2) or because they encountered a technical error (N ¼1). The remaining sample consisted of 45 females (mean age¼ 21.07 years, SD ¼1.48) who completed this study in return for credits for an introductory level psychology course. Participants were predominantly Chinese (80%). The remaining sample consisted of Indian (7%) and Vietnamese (4%) participants, as well as one Bangladeshi, one Fillipino, one Burmese, and one undisclosed participant.
Rather than using the exact same procedure for children and adults, we introduced two variations in the adult pilot experiment. First, we used multiplication equations instead of geometrical shapes in order to avoid ceiling performance. Participants pressed one of two counterbalanced response keys to indicate whether an equation overlaid on a distractor was correct or incorrect (e.g., 2 Â 2 ¼5 would be incorrect). A second modification was that the experiment was divided into two counterbalanced blocks during one of which the experimenter rested her hand on the participant's forearma form of skin-to-skin contact that was deemed fairly appropriate between strangers. This modification was introduced to assess potential short-term touch effects on social orienting.
For statistical analysis, we trimmed correct trial reaction times to 72SD and analyzed the resulting mean reaction times using a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Touch and Image as repeated measures factors. Participants had significantly longer reaction times during face trials (mean¼ 1110.94 ms, SD ¼199.42) relative to house trials (mean¼ 1088.52 ms, SD ¼196.45; F(1, 44) ¼ 4.64, p o.05) suggesting that they were more distracted by faces than houses. Importantly, the effect of Touch and its interaction with Face were non-significant (ps 4.1). Thus, the pilot study replicated the well-established face bias in adults indicating that our paradigm is suitable for the study of social orienting. Additionally, the absence of differences between the touch and no-touch block suggested that immediate touch plays an insignificant role in affecting social orienting as measured with this procedure.