Researchers Are Trying to Develop a Tickle Map—and It Looks Similar Across Cultures

New research suggests ticklishness follows a shared human pattern.

Tickling is one of the strangest glitches of the human body. A playful touch can make us laugh, twitch, panic, curl into a ball and beg for mercy — sometimes all at once.

Now scientists have produced one of the most detailed maps yet of where humans say they are ticklish. And across Chinese, Dutch and Greek participants, the maps looked remarkably similar. Armpits, feet, the abdomen, neck and sides of the torso repeatedly emerged as tickle hotspots. People across the three groups also reported similar reactions to being tickled and similar social dynamics around who does the tickling.

“Wait! Let Me Tell You Something!”

In the study, Ziliang Xiong and Konstantina Kilteni of the Donders Institute at Radboud University, working with Karolinska Institutet, surveyed 448 adults ages 18 to 30 from three cultural backgrounds. More than 98% said they had been tickled at least once; more than 95% said they had tickled someone else.

The responses looked familiar across cultures. People laughed or resisted. Sometimes they tried to escape, tickled back, screamed, or just smiled. Family members and friends were the most common ticklers, followed by romantic partners. In childhood, older people often did the tickling. In adulthood, same-age ticklers became more common.

“We found remarkably similar patterns regardless of where participants came from,” Kilteni said in a Radboud University release. “More than 95% of the people we studied had either been tickled themselves or had tickled someone else, suggesting that tickling behaviors are widespread.”

The team also asked participants to color body diagrams showing where they felt most ticklish. Yet again, across cultures, the resulting maps were strikingly consistent. The armpits, neck, abdomen, sides of the torso, and soles stood out across all three groups. Partner-related tickling produced a similar pattern, with added emphasis near the groin and inner thighs.

It’s More of a Nervous Laughter…

The study also complicates a common assumption: laughter during tickling doesn’t equal joy. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t enjoy being tickled.

About 42% of participants said they enjoyed being tickled as children. As adults, that fell to about 35%. More than a quarter described the experience as unpleasant, while many adults landed somewhere in the middle. As an extremely ticklish person myself, I’d put it somewhat less scientifically: “too intense.”

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That fits the lived experience of many ticklish people: the laugh arrives before consent can catch up. “People clearly associate tickling with laughter,” Kilteni added, “but they don’t necessarily think that laughter reflects pleasure.”

Researchers have long wondered why tickling feels so different from ordinary touch. Aristotle linked it to delicate skin. Darwin proposed that rarely touched body parts may be more ticklish. Others suggested vulnerable body regions, touch sensitivity, or pleasure.

The new study tested those ideas against the tickle maps. Thin skin didn’t explain the pattern; lips and eyelids are thin, but they are not major tickle hotspots. Ordinary touch sensitivity also failed. So did pleasure and a measure of vulnerability based on large arteries.

Darwin’s idea fared best: body parts touched less often tended to be more ticklish. But even that did not explain everything. The researchers concluded that ticklishness comes from a mix of social context, sensory prediction, physiology, and emotion.

The research also leaves room for an important social lesson. Tickling can bond people, but it can also overwhelm them. The same reaction that makes tickling look playful can make it hard for someone to signal discomfort.

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The map may be shared across cultures, but the rules still belong to the person being tickled.

The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.