Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain.

On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.

Social rejection doesn't just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being.

'Subliminal' is about how we misinterpret our behavior because we're unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.

Our subliminal mental processes operate outside awareness because they arise in these portions of our mind that are inaccessible to our conscious self; their inaccessibility is due to the architecture of the brain rather than because they have been subject to Freudian motivational forces like repression.

By subliminal, I mean things that occur in our world that are below the threshold of consciousness but do have a psychological effect on us.