Perhaps not as silky smooth as your brain leads you to think, say scientists who have revealed an intriguing illusion fostered through intimate relationships.
A series of studies by researchers at the University College London found participants consistently rated the skin of another person as being softer than their own, whether or not it really was softer. The researchers suggest that this phenomenon - specifically experienced during slow, gentle stroking - may exist to ensure that humans are motivated to build social bonds through touch.
"The illusion reveals a largely automatic and unconscious mechanism by which 'giving pleasure is receiving pleasure' in the touch domain," study leader Dr Aikaterini Fotopoulou said.
Here's some advice for Donald Trump - showing everyone how rich you are might worsen wealth inequality.
Here's some advice for Donald Trump - showing everyone how rich you are might worsen wealth inequality.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, researchers performed experiments using an online public good game in which players could interact and gain or lose wealth.
More than 1400 participants were randomly assigned initial wealth levels and were embedded within social networks with three levels of economic inequality.
They found that in those social networks that initially had greater inequality, increasing wealth visibility led to greater inequality than when players could not see others' wealth.
Further, the authors showed that making others' wealth visible could have "adverse social consequences" - yielding lower levels of co-operation, inter-connectedness and wealth.
Violent at heart?
Researchers have suggested an odd harbinger for severe violence by adult men - a low resting heart rate in late adolescence.
A paper in JAMA Psychiatry investigated whether resting heart rate (RHR) - already linked to antisocial behaviour in children and adolescents - could predict violent criminality later in life.
Using data collected from more than 700,000 Swedish men born from 1958 to 1991, they discovered the 132,595 men with the lowest resting heart rate - less than or equal to 60 beats per minute - had a 39 per cent higher chance of being convicted of violent crimes and a 25 per cent higher chance for non-violent crimes.
"Our results confirm that, in addition to being associated with ... antisocial outcomes in childhood and adolescence, low RHR increases the risk for violent and non-violent antisocial behaviours in adulthood," the authors concluded.
What kind of traveller are you?
Whether you're the sort of person always seeking out new places, or the type content to keep returning to somewhere you've been, scientists now have a name for you. You're either an explorer or a returner.
Researchers put together a dataset composed of 67,000 individuals' call records over a three-month period, and compared it with the GPS traces of roughly 46,000 vehicles travelling through Italy over a month.
For each tracked person, they compared the overall distance travelled to their recurrent movement, and found journeys in an intrepid subset of "explorers" much harder to predict than the patterns of "returners".
The Nature Communications study found that explorers, because of "non-recurring mobility", were more likely to influence the potential spread of epidemics - and as the proportion of them increased, so too did the chances of a widespread disease epidemic.
