Right-handed women diagnosed with restricting type or binge-eating/purging type AN, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th Edition)'s criteria (DSM, American Psychiatric Association, 2013), will be consecutively recruited during their rehabilitative treatment at the Istituto Auxologico Italiano, IRCCS, San Giuseppe Hospital (Italy). Concurrent neurological, neurodevelopmental (e.g., autism), motor, somatosensory and/or psychiatric disorders will be the exclusion criteria, as well as the evidence of any skin-related condition possibly affecting sensitivity on the participants' forearm (e.g., eczema, scars)

Age-matched, right-handed, healthy women (i.e., with no history of eating disorders) will be recruited outside the hospital through personal contacts of the researchers and word-of-mouth.

Affective touch paradigm: experimental stimuli will include the touch of a soft cosmetic, a hand, which will be both expected to resemble affective pleasant stimulations, and a plastic stick with a rounded tip, as a control (non-affective) condition. Two speeds of stimulation will be adopted i) slow affective stimuli delivered at 3 cm/s and fast non-affective stimuli, delivered at non-optimal speed (18 cm/s). An imagery version of the task will be also administered: blindfolded participants will be asked to image the touches on their left forearm.

After each (actual or imagined) tactile stimulus, individuals will rate the experience level of pleasantness.

As part of the protocol, they will fill out two psychological questionnaires, assessing the level of social anhedonia and the amount and characteristics of the lifespan experiences of affective touch in close relationships.

Behavioural outcome associated with the experimental paradigm: participants will be asked to rate the pleasantness of the tactile stimuli after each stimulation with a score ranging from zero not pleasant at all) to 100 (extremely pleasant).

Social anhedonia will be evaluated with the Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale (ACIPS, Gooding and Pflum, 2014); this is a 17-item self-report measure of individuals' tendency to look forward to interactions with others (anticipatory interpersonal pleasure - 7 items) and experienced pleasure in social interactions (consummatory interpersonal pleasure - 10 items). The ACIPS is scored on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (very false for me) to 6 (very true for me); higher scores indicate higher anticipatory and consummatory interpersonal pleasure.the assessment