24
FEAR
17
HAPPINESS
30
GRATITUDE
21
SELF-CONSCIOUS EMOTIONS
EMBARRASSMENT
18
DISGUST
16
ENVY
21
DISGUST
12
PRIDE
18
GRATITUDE
25
PRO-SOCIAL EMOTIONS
LOVE
51
SYMPATHY
28
GRATITUDE
55
SYMPATHY
16
SYMPATHY
57
LOVE
17
Humans can communicate emotion with one-second touches to the forearm.
We replicated this study in Spain, known as a high-touch culture, and, our participants were a bit better able to decode emotions through touch.
Our study also involved all possible gender combinations—women touching women and men, and men touching women and men. Here we found two gender differences that speak volumes about the different planets women and men are claimed to originate from. The female participants’ attempts to communicate anger via touch to the male touchees were a failure. The male participants had no idea what the females were doing, and the males’ judgment data amounted to a random collection of guesses at what the women were trying to convey. A woman’s anger does not seem to penetrate the skin of a man. Regrettably, it gets worse. The male participants’ attempts to communicate sympathy to the females were absolutely unintelligible to the females; the males’ attempts at sympathy fell on deaf skin, so to speak.
When we coded what people were doing when touching to communicate the different emotions, we documented behavior that traces back in evolutionary time to our hominid predecessors. Sympathy was conveyed most regularly with a soothing, slow stroke to the arm, no doubt designed to trigger maximal activation in those Merkel cells in the epidermis, generating neural impulses directed toward compassion regions of the brain and nervous system. Gratitude, very interestingly, was reliably signaled in a firm clasp of the forearm, adorned with a slight but clear shake of reassurance.
Sympathy and gratitude are central players in the social contract, motivating actions in the service of others. These are not recent arrivals in evolutionary history or contrivances of a particular culture. They are emotions that are embodied in tactile exchanges that have been honed by thousands of generations of hominid evolution, so that today, with a simple touch to the forearm, the receiver of the touch can discern sympathy from gratitude from love.
HOOPS AND PEDICURES
Five minutes at the chimpanzee compound at your local zoo will reveal how pervasive touch is. You’ll see mothers grooming their babies, alpha males picking at the hair of close competitors; two cavorting juveniles, ricocheting around the branches, suddenly stop their antics to groom. In fact, primatologists estimate that chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, devote upwards of 20 percent of their waking hours to grooming. Grooming is so vital to the primate slow loris, Nycticebus tardigradus, that this species has evolved a single nail, known as the toilet claw (in the etymology of toilet, “toilette” came first, and referred to a room to groom in), which evolved to enable frequent grooming.
The first interpretation of the prevalence of grooming in primates, sound and intuitive, was that they were simply ridding one another of parasites, thus enhancing the chances of physical survival. No doubt the need to get rid of bacteria and virus-infested parasites got primates grooming in the first place. Observant primatologists, however, were quick to document episodes of grooming that did not fit the parasite thesis. Primates groom to play, to reconcile, to soothe, to get close, and prior to copulation, with no visible intention of finding parasites. More convincingly, primates groom regularly when there are no known parasites in the physical environment.
This led Robin Dunbar to observe that perhaps grooming is like human gossip. Grooming is a casual exchange of daily living that bonds individuals to one another. It is a glue of our social relations. And so it is with human touch: Touch spreads goodwill, cooperation, and trust.
We live in a touch-deprived culture. The impoverishment of touch in U.S. society owes its deep roots to the Puritans, well known for their attempts at extirpating ordinary human delights—dance, laughter, theatrical drama, and touch. A finger could be pointed at an obvious target, repressive Victorian culture. In the upper-class stratum of Edith Wharton, infant was separated from the breast of mother, sleeping children from sleeping parents, dreaming wives from dreaming husbands, and skin was covered to remain inaccessible to the human hand. A product of this cultural legacy, the influential psychologist and educator John Watson observed: “There is a sensible way of treating children. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night and shake hands with them in the morning.”
Today, the signs of touch deprivation are abundant. Teachers are actively prevented from giving students pats on the back or, God forbid, a hug, out of a fear of allegations of sexual harassment (I’d bet my life savings that any teacher worth his or her salt knows the right kind of touch to encourage students). Parenting manuals discourage too much physical contact on the assumption that the child might grow up to be “overenmeshed.” In a recent observational study of the frequency of touch in cafés in different parts of the world, University of Florida psychologist S. M. Jourard observed two people in conversation over a cup of coffee. In London, not a single touch was observed; in Florida, 2; in Paris, 110; and in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 180.
Yet the instinct to touch is too wired into us to remove from our daily affairs. The ancient, evolved tendency to touch has obvious cultural translations—massages. The instinct to touch is evident in quirkier cultural forms—the hundreds of cuddle clubs that have sprung up across the country, where people lie around in euphoric, sleepy-eyed piles, cuddling nonsexually (so they claim). The need to touch is hidden in various cultural forms: manicures, pedicures, haircuts, and, I would wager, a rate of visits to medical doctors that would startle insurance companies. This instinct for touch is the source of economic innovation, like the soft carriers that allow parents to carry children where they want to be—close to the front of the body. Compared to infants carried in harder infant seats, infants who were carried in soft infant carriers that put them in close physical contact with their parents are more securely attached to their parents and more willing to explore novel environments. Thanks to Tiffany Field, touch has been integrated into medical treatment. There have now been over ninety scientific studies of touch therapy, and these studies have found that regular touch helps premature infants (who used to be deprived of physical contact), depressed teenage mothers, the elderly in nursing homes, children with autism, ADHD boys, children suffering from asthma and diabetes, and people suffering from disease.