the benefits of touching are not limited to rat pups: For a comprehensive review of the dozens of studies of touch therapies, and the benefits they bring to premature babies, people suffering from depression, and ailments during aging, see Field, Touch.
when teachers are randomly assigned to touch some of their students and not others: D. C. Aguilera, “Relationship between Physical Contact and Verbal Interaction between Nurses and Patients, Journal of Psychiatric Nursing and Mental Health Services 5 (1967): 5–21; J. D. Fisher, M. Rytting, and R. Heslin, “Hands Touching Hands: Affective and Evaluative Effects of an Interpersonal Touch,” Sociometery 39 (1976): 416–21. For a review of the effects of touch, see M. J. Hertenstein et al., “The Communicative Functions of Touch in Humans, Nonhuman Primates, and Rats: A Review and Synthesis of the Empirical Research,” Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 132 (2006): 5–94.
In her excellent book: Field, Touch.
mortality rates for infants: Ibid.
In a more systematic comparison: R. Spitz, “Hospitalism,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1 (1945): 53–74.
Tiffany Field has found that massages given to premature babies lead, on average, to a 47 percent increase in weight gain: Field reviews several studies, including those from her lab, which replicate this important finding. Field, Touch.
The infants who were touched during the procedure: L. Gray et al., “Skin-to-Skin Contact Is Analgesic in Healthy New-Borns,” Pediatrics 105 (2000): 14–20.
Touch alters not only our stress-related physiology: Francis and Meaney, “Maternal Care and the Development of Stress Responses.”
Jim Coan and Richie Davidson had participants wait for a painful burst of white noise: J. A. Coan, H. S. Schaefer, and R. J. Davidson, “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 1032–39.
Frans de Waal, who has studied the role of touch in the patterns of food exchange in chimpanzees: de Waal, Good Natured, 136–44.
participants were asked to sign a petition in support of a particular issue of local importance: F. N. Willis and H. K. Hamm, “The Use of Interpersonal Touch in Securing Compliance,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 5, no. 1 (1980): 49–55.
In a recent study, Robert Kurzban: Kurzban, “The Social Psychophysics of Cooperation: Nonverbal Communication in a Public Goods Game,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 25 (2001): 241–59.
catalogued greeting rituals with surreptitious photography in remote cultures: Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology.
when people feel sympathy and are inclined to help others in need, they show a concerned eyebrow and pressed lip: N. Eisenberg et al., “Relation of Sympathy and Distress to Prosocial Behavior.”
When I presented images of this display: J. Haidt and D. Keltner, “Culture and Facial Expression: Open Ended Methods Find More Faces and a Gradient of Universality,” Cognition and Emotion 13 (1999): 225–66.
I turned to the next best studied modality of emotional communication: E. Simon-Thomas, D. Sauter, and Dacher Keltner, “Vocal Bursts Communicate Distinct Positive Emotions,” unpublished manuscript.
“Touch is both the alpha and omega”: James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 551.
So Matt and I designed an experiment: Matthew Hertenstein et al., “Touch Communicates Distinct Emotions,” Emotion 6 (2006): 528–33.
This led Robin Dunbar: Robin I. M. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
We live in a touch-deprived culture: Ashley Montagu, “Animadversions on the Development of a Theory of Touch,” in Touch in Early Development, ed. Tiffany M. Field (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995) 1–10.
“There is a sensible way”: J. Watson, Psychological Care of Infant and Child (New York: W. W. Norton, 1928), 9–10.
In a recent observational study: S. M. Jourard, “An Exploratory Study of Body Accessibility,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 5 (1966): 221–31.
Compared to infants carried in harder: E. Anisfeld et al., “Does Infant Carrying Promote Attachment? An Experimental Study of the Increased Physical Contact on the Development of Attachment,” Child Development 61 (1990): 1617–27.
LOVE
so sharply summarized in: Ridley, The Red Queen, chaps. 6, 7; Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock, chaps. 7, 8.
universality of serial monogamy: David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
human males actively contribute to the raising of the offspring: Hrdy, Mother Nature; 205–17, Konner, The Tangled Wing, 263, 266.
spur the scientific study of parent-child love: John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1978); Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (London: Tavistock, 1979); Bowlby, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1988).
she documented familial universals: Mary D. S. Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda: Infant Care and the Growth of Love (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).
rhesus monkeys raised in isolation: H. F. Harlow, “Love in Infant Monkeys,” Scientific American 200 (1959): 68–74. H. F. Harlow and M. K. Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys,” Scientific American 207 (1962): 136–46.
These early attachment experiences, dozens of human studies show, lay the foundation of the capacity to connect: Mario Mikulincer and Philip Shaver have been the leading scientists in extending Bowlby’s theorizing to adult human relationships. Mikulincer and Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood: Activation, Psychodynamics, and Interpersonal Processes,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, ed. Mark P. Zanna (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 53–152, and Attachment Patterns in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change (New York: Guilford Press, in press).
People who report a sense of secure attachment perceive their partners to be a steady source of support and love: Nancy Collins was one of the first to do the difficult empirical work of applying Bowlby’s claims about attachment to the processes of intimate romantic relations. N. L. Collins, “Working Models of Attachment: Implications for Explanation, Emotion, and Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (1996): 810–32; Collins and B. C. Feeney, “A Safe Haven: An Attachment Theory Perspective on Support Seeking and Caregiving in Intimate Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78 (2000): 1053–73.
And as life progresses: For an excellent summary of the life-courses of people with different attachment styles, see Mikulincer and Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood.”
A quick study of a morning in such a house: ibid.
When Chris Fraley and Phil Shaver surreptitiously observed romantic partners as they said good-bye in airports: R. C. Fraley and Shaver, “Airport Separations: A Naturalistic Study of Adult Attachment Dynamics in Separating Couples,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 1198–1212.
Anxiously attached individuals are more likely to interpret life events: Mikulincer and Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood.”
And bonobos wage: de Waal, “Bonobo Sex and Society.”