The Power of Touch - The New Yorker - 0 views
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At a home in the Romanian city of Iași, Carlson measured cortisol levels in a group of children ranging from two months to three years old. The caregiver-to-child ratio was twenty to one, and most of the children had experienced severe neglect and sensory deprivation. Multiple times a day, Carlson took saliva samples, tracking how cortisol levels fluctuated in response to stressful events. The children, she found, were hormonally off kilter. Under normal conditions, cortisol peaks just before we wake up and then tapers off; in the leagăne infants, it peaked in the afternoon and remained elevated. Those levels, in turn, correlated with faltering performance on numerous cognitive and physical assessments. Then Carlson tried an intervention modelled on the work of Joseph Sparling, a child-development specialist, and the outcomes changed. When half of the orphans received more touching from more caregivers—an increase in hugs, holding, and the making of small adjustments to clothes and hair—their performance markedly improved. They grew bigger, stronger, and more responsive, both cognitively and emotionally, and they reacted better to stress.
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Touch is the first of the senses to develop in the human infant, and it remains perhaps the most emotionally central throughout our lives. While many researchers have appreciated its power, others have been more circumspect. Writing in 1928, John B. Watson, one of the originators of the behaviorist school of psychology, urged parents to maintain a physical boundary between themselves and their children: “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinarily good job on a difficult task.” Watson acknowledged that children must be bathed, clothed, and cared for, but he believed that excessive touching—that is, caressing—would create “mawkish” adults. An untouched child, he argued, “enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.” Now we know that, to attain that result, he should have suggested the opposite: touch, as frequent and as caring as possible
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And yet touch is rarely purely physical. Field’s more recent work has shown that the brain is very good at distinguishing an emotional touch from a similar, but non-emotional, one. A massage chair is not a masseuse. Certain touch receptors exist solely to convey emotion to the brain, rather than sensory information about the external environment. A recent study shows that we can identify other people’s basic emotions based on how they touch us, even when they are separated from us by a curtain. And the emotions that are communicated by touch can go on to shape our behavior. One recent review found that, even if we have no conscious memory of a touch—a hand on the shoulder, say—we may be more likely to agree to a request, respond more (or less) positively to a person or product, or form closer bonds with someone.