Physical touch can strengthen our emotional bonds with other people, but it's easy to cross the line and come off as a touchy-feely creep.
Luckily, a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has defined our unspoken social conventions.
The study surveyed 1,368 people and found that the closer a person feels to someone, the more likely they'd feel comfortable being touched on a larger area of their bodies.
Scroll down to see where and by whom the respondents drew the lines — quite literally — of a touch being OK or downright weird.
Researchers asked 1,368 people from Finland, France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom to color in a human outline to show where they didn't mind being touched by different relations.
Then the scientists averaged all the drawings. White and yellow areas indicate a comfortable area to touch, while red and dark red areas indicate discomfort.
Black areas indicate a "taboo zone," where a person with that relationship "is not allowed to touch."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider