Sharon K Farber - Why We All Need to be Touched

Sharon Farber, PhD, is the author of When the Body Is the Target: Self-Harm, Pain, and Traumatic Attachments (2002), an excellent book that I have found to be very useful with some of the clients with whom I work. In this post from her Psychology Today blog, The Mind-Body Connection, looks at the importance of touch for emotional and psychological health.

I tend to agree - and I think it's important for therapists to have a list of bodywork practitioners they know and trust (male and female) to whom they can refer clients.

The Mind-Body Connection

Why We All Need to be Touched

Published on December 25, 2013 by Sharon K. Farber, Ph.D. in The Mind-Body Connection

Being touched and touching someone else are fundamental modes of human interaction, and increasingly, many people are seeking out their own "professional touchers" and body arts teachers-- chiropractors, physical therapists, Gestalt therapists, Rolfers, the Alexander-technique and Feldenkrais people, massage therapists, martial arts and T'ai Chi Ch'uan instructors. And some even wait in physicians’ offices for a physical examination for ailments that have no organic cause—they wait to be touched.

The body-oriented approaches are based on a principle that is becoming more obvious to researchers: Ken Wilbur wrote in The Spectrum of Consciousness,

"For every mental 'problem' or 'knot', there is a corresponding bodily 'knot', and vice versa since, in fact, the body and the mind are not two. That is, psychic conflict, guilt, shame, unresolved grief all can be lodged in the body as body memories, and when the site of the psychic difficulty is deeply touched through massage or other manipulation, it can not only release the physical pain but may make the psychic pain accessible."

I remember that soon after my mother died I developed a case of frozen shoulder, technically called adhesive capsulitis, in my left shoulder. It causes stiffness and pain in the shoulder joint and often occurs for no known reason. My doctor had told me that because my shoulder was "frozen", there must be adhesions, or scar tissue that were freezing up my shoulder joint. And probably my body lacked something called synovial fluid, needed to lubricate the shoulder joint. I asked him what caused this to happen. He could not say, because medicine does not really understand why it happens. He referred me for physical therapy.

I like to understand why things happen the way they do and he could not tell me. But I was in pain. I could not sleep in the usual position I sleep in, I couldn’t reach for something on a shelf without feeling pain. So I made an appointment for a physical therapy evaluation for treatment. As I lay on the examining table, the physical therapist came in, smiled, introduced herself and explained what she was going to do. As soon as she put her warm hands on my shoulder, tears welled up in my eyes. I was surprised and embarrassed and turned my head away from her gaze so that she would not see. I suspect she noticed. She continued examining me and I found that I enjoyed it. It felt like a massage, something I am not used to having. She recommended that I come in three times a week and I had to arrange my schedule to do that. She did various exercises with me that I was advised to do at home. As I followed her instructions, I thought and felt a great deal about my mother, with whom I had a complex and ambivalent relationship. I stretched and cried, cried and stretched, wrote about what I was feeling, and after a few months I was better. The pain of my loss had lodged itself in my body, and a woman’s warm touch started to release it. It also probably released some oxytocin in me, the hormone of love and attachment. As I mourned her loss over several months, I realized something. I had had a hard time crying for my mother, whom I loved very much but whom I was angry with too. When there are difficulties in mourning a loss, somatic or psychological difficulties may present themselves. The therapist’s warm touch on my shoulder was lubrication for my soul, needed for me to let go and feel the loss, complicated and ambivalent as it was.

Treatment that uses direct touch can have a depth and potency that can have a great therapeutic impact, which provides some explanation for why so many people are seeking out their own "professional touchers" or are filling the waiting rooms of physicians, waiting for the doctor to find the cause of the pain and make them better. In the process, they are touched. When the patient is assured that the work of the professional toucher is free from infringement, that sexual contact is clearly out of bounds, and that the patient can say "no" to any intervention the body-work practioner proposes, then the patient can have the experience of trust and physical touch in the context of a controlled respectful relationship.

Nature is so intelligent for creating oxytocin. Kerstin Uvnas Moberg became a world authority on ocytocin through her personal experience. When she, was pregnant, delivered, and nursed her four children, she was struck by feeling a state of mind so different from the stress she was used to in connection with life’s other challenges—challenge, performance, and competition. Wanting to understand this scientifically, she learned that there is a key biological marker—oxytocin—that can explain this sense of calm and connectedness in pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, and through this research, discovered hat oxytocin is able to influence many vital operations in the body. Her research showed that the level of oxytocin in the blood during nursing was correlated with the mothers’ subjective experiences of calmness, and ability to interact with their babies. Oxytocin stimulates growth during pregnancy and stimulates the uterus to expel the newborn It restores the balance between stress and calm It stimulates the muscle activity of orgasm (in both men and women) and can, when conditions are good, strengthen the attachment bond. We are told that “oxytocin is with us throughout our lives.” She wrote that, with a natural delivery to loving parents,

When you were born, oxytocin helped expel you from your mother’s womb and made it possible for her to nurse you. As a small child, you enjoyed your mother’s and father’s loving touch because it released oxytocin in your body. As an adult, you experience the effects of oxytocin when you enjoy good food, or a massage, or an intimate interlude with your romantic partner (Uvnas Moberg 2003, p. 65).

If you’d like to learn more about oxytocin, read Uvnas Moberg’s book The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing.

If you’d like to learn more about how, when people lack love and touch in their lives, they may turn to “professional touchers, read my book, When the Body Is the Target: Self-Harm, Pain, and Traumatic Attachments. It will also tell you about how when people lack love and touch in their lives this can result in bodily self harm.

TED Radio Hour - Do We Need Humans?

On this week's episode of the TED Radio Hour, from NPR, the topic is whether or not we need humans anymore, with TED Talks from Sherry Turkle (Connected, But Alone), Cynthia Breazeal (The Rise of Personal Robots), Andrew McAfee (Are Droids Taking Our Jobs?), and Abraham Verghese (A Doctor's Touch).

Do We Need Humans?

How can we use technology and preserve our human dignity?

We've been promised a future where robots will be our friends, and technology will make life's daily chores as easy as flipping a switch. But are we ready for how those innovations will change us as humans? In this episode, TED speakers consider the promises and perils of our relationship with technology.

Listen to the Full Episode

Are We Plugged-In, Connected, But Alone?
12:29, by NPR/TED Staff
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About Sherry Turkle's TEDTalk

As we expect more from technology, do we expect less from each other? Sherry Turkle looks at how devices and online personas are redefining human connection. She says we need to really think about the kinds of connections we want to have.

Sherry Turkle is concerned about how our devices are changing us, as human beings.

About Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle studies how technology is shaping our modern relationships with others, with ourselves, with it. Described as the "Margaret Mead of digital culture," Turkle is currently focusing on the world of social media and sociable robots. In her most recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, Turkle argues that the social media we encounter on a daily basis are confronting us with a moment of temptation.

Drawn by the illusion of companionship without the demands of intimacy, we confuse postings and online sharing with authentic communication. We are drawn to sacrifice conversation for mere connection. But Turkle suggests that digital technology is still in its infancy and there is ample time for us to reshape how we build it and use it. She is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. 

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Will Man's Best Friend Be A Robot?
12:17, by NPR/TED Staff
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About Cynthia Breazeal's TEDTalk

Why do we use robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms? Cynthia Breazeal realized the key was training robots to interact with people. Now she builds robots that teach, learn — and play.

About Cynthia Breazeal

Cynthia Breazeal founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at MIT's Media Lab. Her research focuses on developing the principles and technologies for building personal robots that are socially intelligent — that interact and communicate with people in human-centric terms, work with humans as peers, and learn from people as an apprentice.

She has developed some of the world's most famous robotic creatures, ranging from small hexapod robots to highly expressive humanoids, including the social robot Kismet and the expressive robot Leonardo. Her recent work investigates the impact of social robots on helping people of all ages to achieve personal goals that contribute to quality of life, in domains such as physical performance, learning and education, health, and family communication and play over distance. She's also the author of Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots. 

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Are Droids Taking Our Jobs?
13:08, by NPR/TED Staff
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About Andrew McAfee's TEDTalk

Robots and algorithms can now build cars, write articles, and translate texts — all work that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee looks at recent labor data to say: We ain't seen nothing yet.

About Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee studies how information technology affects businesses and society. McAfee's research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition, society, the economy and the workforce. He's a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His books include Enterprise 2.0 and Race Against the Machine (with Erik Brynjolfsson).

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Is The Human Hand Our Best Technology?
11:16, by NPR/TED Staff
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About Abraham Verghese's TEDTalk

Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful, old-fashioned tool: human touch. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are data points, and calls for a return to the traditional physical exam.

"Only the hand can tell where it's tender, where the patient winces." -€” Abraham Verghese

About Abraham Verghese

In our era of the patient-as-data-point, Abraham Verghese believes in the old-fashioned physical exam, the bedside chat, the power of informed observation. Before he finished medical school, Abraham Verghese spent a year on the other end of the medical pecking order, as a hospital orderly. Moving unseen through the wards, he saw the patients with new eyes, as human beings rather than collections of illnesses. The experience has informed his work as a doctor — and as a writer. "Imagining the Patient's Experience" was the motto of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics, which he founded at the University of Texas San Antonio, where he brought a deep-seated empathy. He's now a professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford, where his old-fashioned weekly rounds have inspired a new initiative, the Stanford 25, teaching 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns. He's also the author of a number of books, including his most recent, Cutting For Stone.

Dacher Keltner - The Emotional Benefits of Touch

This is a great article from YES! Magazine on the psychological, physical, and emotional benefits of touch. We know that infants can wither and even die without touch (failure to thrive), but that need does not end as we grow up.

Touch, compassionate touch, is necessary for human health - both physical and emotional. We are interpersonal beings, and part of that communal need involves loving physical contact. Touch generates oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone," that relieves stress and calms the mind.

Next time you feel stressed, lonely, angry, or sad, cuddle up with someone you love and just be together. If that is not available, get a pet - petting our animals also releases oxytocin.

Hands-on Research: The Science of Touch

How everyday forms of touch can bring us emotional balance and better health.

by Dacher Keltner

posted Nov 26, 2010

A pat on the back, a caress of the arm—these are everyday, incidental gestures that we usually take for granted, thanks to our amazingly dexterous hands.

But after years spent immersed in the science of touch, I can tell you that they are far more profound than we usually realize: They are our primary language of compassion, and a primary means for spreading compassion.

In recent years, a wave of studies has documented some incredible emotional and physical health benefits that come from touch. This research is suggesting that touch is truly fundamental to human communication, bonding, and health.

In my own lab, in a study led by my former student Matt Hertenstein (now a professor at DePauw University), we asked whether humans can clearly communicate compassion through touch.

Here’s what we did: We built a barrier in our lab that separated two strangers from each other. One person stuck his or her arm through the barrier and waited. The other person was given a list of emotions, and he or she had to try to convey each emotion through a one-second touch to the stranger’s forearm. The person whose arm was being touched had to guess the emotion.

Given the number of emotions being considered, the odds of guessing the right emotion by chance were about 8 percent. But remarkably, participants guessed compassion correctly nearly 60 percent of the time. Gratitude, anger, love, fear—they got those right more than 50 percent of the time as well.

We had various gender combinations in the study, and I feel obligated to disclose two gender differences we found: When a woman tried to communicate anger to a man, he got zero right—he had no idea what she was doing. And when a man tried to communicate compassion to a woman, she didn’t know what was going on!

But obviously, there’s a bigger message here than “men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” Touch provides its own language of compassion, a language that is essential to what it means to be human.

In fact, in other research I’ve found that people can not only identify love, gratitude, and compassion from touches but can differentiate between those kinds of touch, something people haven’t done as well in studies of facial and vocal communication.


“To touch is to give life”

Regrettably, though, some Western cultures are pretty touch-deprived, and this is especially true of the United States.

Ethologists who live in different parts world quickly recognize this. Nonhuman primates spend about 10 to 20 percent of their waking day grooming each other. If you go to various other countries, people spend a lot of time in direct physical contact with one another—much more than we do.

This has been well-documented. One of my favorite examples is a study from the 1960s by pioneering psychologist Sidney Jourard, who studied the conversations of friends in different parts of the world as they sat in a café together. He observed these conversations for the same amount of time in each of the different countries.

What did he find? In England, the two friends touched each other zero times. In the United States, in bursts of enthusiasm, we touched each other twice.

But in France, the number shot up to 110 times per hour. And in Puerto Rico, those friends touched each other 180 times!

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons why people are inclined to keep their hands to themselves, especially in a society as litigious as ours. But other research has revealed what we lose when we hold back too much.

The benefits start from the moment we’re born. A review of research, conducted by Tiffany Field, a leader in the field of touch, found that preterm newborns who received just three 15-minute sessions of touch therapy each day for 5-10 days gained 47 percent more weight than premature infants who’d received standard medical treatment.

Similarly, research by Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney has found that rats whose mothers licked and groomed them a lot when they were infants grow up to be calmer and more resilient to stress, with a stronger immune system. This research sheds light on why, historically, an overwhelming percentage of humans babies in orphanages where caretakers starved them of touch have failed to grow to their expected height or weight, and have shown behavioral problems.

“To touch can be to give life,” said Michelangelo, and he was absolutely right.

From this frontier of touch research, we know thanks to neuroscientist Edmund Rolls that touch activates the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex, which is linked to feelings of reward and compassion.

We also know that touch builds up cooperative relationships—it reinforces reciprocity between our primate relatives, who use grooming to build up cooperative alliances.

There are studies showing that touch signals safety and trust, it soothes. Basic warm touch calms cardiovascular stress. It activates the body’s vagus nerve, which is intimately involved with our compassionate response, and a simple touch can trigger release of oxytocin, aka “the love hormone.”

In a study by Jim Coan and Richard Davidson, participants lying in an fMRI brain scanner, anticipating a painful blast of white noise, showed heightened brain activity in regions associated with threat and stress. But participants whose romantic partner stroked their arm while they waited didn’t show this reaction at all. Touch had turned off the threat switch.

Touch can even have economic effects, promoting trust and generosity. When psychologist Robert Kurzban had participants play the “prisoner’s dilemma” game, in which they could choose either to cooperate or compete with a partner for a limited amount of money, an experimenter gently touched some of the participants as they were starting to play the game—just a quick pat on the back. But it made a big difference: Those who were touched were much more likely to cooperate and share with their partner.

These kinds of benefits can pop up in unexpected places: In a recent study out of my lab, published in the journal Emotion we found that, in general, NBA basketball teams whose players touch each other more win more games.

Touch therapies


Given all these findings, it only makes sense to think up ways to incorporate touch into different form of therapy.

“Touch therapy” or “massage therapy” may sound like some weird Berkeley idea, but it’s got hard science on its side. It’s not just good for our muscles; it’s good for our entire physical and mental health.

Proper uses of touch truly have the potential to transform the practice of medicine—and they’re cost effective to boot. For example, studies show that touching patients with Alzheimer’s disease can have huge effects on getting them to relax, make emotional connections with others, and reduce their symptoms of depression.

Tiffany Field has found that massage therapy reduces pain in pregnant women and alleviates prenatal depression—in the women and their spouses alike. Research here at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health has found that getting eye contact and a pat on the back from a doctor may boost survival rates of patients with complex diseases.

The Road to Real Health

Health care's just part of the picture. Five policies
that would be good for our health, happiness, and wallets.

And educators, take note: A study by French psychologist Nicolas Gueguen has found that when teachers pat students in a friendly way, those students are three times as likely to speak up in class. Another recent study has found that when librarians pat the hand of a student checking out a book, that student says he or she likes the library more—and is more likely to come back.

Touch can even be a therapeutic way to reach some of the most challenging children: Some research by Tiffany Field suggests that children with autism, widely believed to hate being touched, actually love being massaged by a parent or therapist.

This doesn’t mean you should turn around and grope your neighbor or invade the personal space of everyone around you.

But to me, the science of touch convincingly suggests that we’re wired to—we need to—connect with other people on a basic physical level. To deny that is to deprive ourselves of some of life’s greatest joys and deepest comforts.

---

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., is the executive editor of Greater Good, the UC Berkeley-based magazine that covers research into the roots of compassion, happiness, and altruism.This article is republished through a special collaboration between Greater Good and YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Dacher is also the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and a co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness.

Interested?

• We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect: Recent research has shown that our brains are made to support caring, cooperation, and service.
  
• Video: Becoming an Empathic Civilization: Economist Jeremy Rifkin believes we can do it, and now he’s got cartoons to show why.
• Want the Good Life? Your Neighbors Need It, Too: An interview with epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, whose research shows that what the healthiest and happiest societies have in common is not that they have more, but that what they have is more equitably shared.

Tags: Psychology, touch, mental health, Health, body, YES! Magazine, Hands-on Research, The Science of Touch, Dacher Keltner, emotional balance, better health, oxytocin, stress, compassion, communication, bonding

NPR - Human Connections Start With A Friendly Touch

I heard this story from NPR's Morning Edition on the way to work yesterday morning, or the day before, or something. Anyway, I thought it was cool.

We'd be much happier and healthier people if we weren't so touch-phobic and physically isolated. I used to be very uncomfortable with touch, now it seems so important (ah, the wonders of therapy).

Too bad, speaking of therapy, that there is so much fear of sexual harassment charges or misunderstanding of intent in simply hugging or touching a client on the arm in therapy - a little contact can be so healing - and because we are so touch-phobic, so easily misunderstood.

Maybe we should all follow the example of the hugging saint or the free hugs people.

Human Connections Start With A Friendly Touch

by Michelle Trudeau

September 20, 2010

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Morning Edition

[3 min 35 sec]

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Enlarge Gregory Bull/AP

Hand-holding causes levels of the stress hormone cortisol to drop, says Matt Hertenstein, an experimental psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana. This couple joined hands while protesting offshore oil drilling in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill during a Hands Across the Sand event in Gulfport, Miss.

Social scientists have shown in many studies over the years that supportive touch can have good outcomes in a number of different realms. Consider the following examples: If a teacher touches a student on the back or arm, that student is more likely to participate in class. The more athletes high-five or hug their teammates, the better their game. A touch can make patients like their doctors more. If you touch a bus driver, he's more likely to let you on for free. If a waitress touches the arm or shoulder of a customer, she may get a larger tip.

But why does a friendly or supportive touch have such universal and positive effects? What's happening in our brains and bodies that accounts for this magic?

Skin Deep?

To understand this, we'll start on the outside — with the skin. It's our largest organ, covering about 20 square feet, which is about the size of a twin mattress.

If somebody touches you, there's pressure pushing on your skin at the point of contact. And just under the skin are pressure receptors called "Pacinian corpuscles," says Tiffany Field, one of the world's leading touch researchers and the director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami in Florida.

"They receive pressure stimulation," Field says, "and the pressure receptors send a signal to the brain."

The Pacinian corpuscles' signals go directly to an important nerve bundle deep in the brain called the vagus nerve. The vagus sometimes is called "the wanderer" because it has branches that wander throughout the body to several internal organs, including the heart. And it's the vagus nerve that then slows the heart down and decreases blood pressure.

Field describes studies in which subjects were asked to perform something stressful, like public speaking or taking a timed math test. The subjects' partners were also part of the experiment, hugging or holding hands with the subjects when the researchers told them to.

"They found that, in fact, people who were given this stressful task, if they'd been holding hands or being hugged, they would have a lower blood pressure and lower heart rate, suggesting that they were less stressed," Field says.

Impact On Stress

Hand-holding or hugging also results in a decrease of the stress hormone cortisol, says Matt Hertenstein, an experimental psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana.

"Having this friendly touch, just somebody simply touching our arm and holding it, buffers the physiological consequences of this stressful response," Hertenstein says.

In addition to calming us down and reducing our stress response, a friendly touch also increases release of the oxytocin — also called the "cuddle hormone" — which affects trust behaviors.

"Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, which basically promotes feelings of devotion, trust and bonding," Hertenstein says.

Oxytocin levels go up with holding hands, hugging — and especially with therapeutic massage. The cuddle hormone makes us feel close to one another.

"It really lays the biological foundation and structure for connecting to other people," Hertenstein says.

Just Like Chocolate

Besides engendering feelings of closeness, being touched is also pleasant. We usually want more. So what's going on in the brain that accounts for these feelings?

Hertenstein says recent studies from England pinpointed an area in the brain that becomes highly activated in response to friendly touch. It's a region called the orbital frontal cortex located just above your eyes. It's the same area that responds to sweet tastes and pleasing smells.

"A soft touch on the arm makes the orbital frontal cortex light up, just like those other rewarding stimuli," Hertenstein says. "So, touch is a very powerful rewarding stimulus — just like your chocolate that you find in your cupboard at home."

The surging of oxytocin makes you feel more trusting and connected. And the cascade of electrical impulses slows your heart and lowers your blood pressure, making you feel less stressed and more soothed. Remarkably, this complex surge of events in the brain and body are all initiated by a simple, supportive touch.

Tags: Human Connections, Friendly Touch, Michelle Trudeau, NPR, Morning Edition, Hand-holding, stress hormones, cortisol, oxytocin, Matt Hertenstein, skin, vagus nerve, Tiffany Field, Pacinian corpuscles, Psychology, happiness, hugs

Steve Bradt - How Touch Can Influence Judgments (Harvard Gazette)

A cool article from the Harvard Gazette - researchers suggest that "interpersonal interactions can be shaped, profoundly yet unconsciously, by the physical attributes of incidental objects: Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain."

How touch can influence judgments

Researchers say that how objects feel can influence the ways in which people proceed to interpret them

By Steve Bradt, Harvard Staff Writer

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Christopher Nocera displays rough and smooth puzzle pieces used for research showing how tactile sensations can influence social judgments, perceptions of people, and decision making.

Psychologists report in the journal Science that interpersonal interactions can be shaped, profoundly yet unconsciously, by the physical attributes of incidental objects: Resumes reviewed on a heavy clipboard are judged to be more substantive, while a negotiator seated in a soft chair is less likely to drive a hard bargain.

The research was conducted by psychologists at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University. The authors say the work suggests that physical touch — the first of our senses to develop — may continue to operate throughout life like a scaffold upon which people build their social judgments and decisions.

“Touch remains perhaps the most under-appreciated sense in behavioral research,” said co-author Christopher C. Nocera, a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. “Our work suggests that greetings involving touch, such as handshakes and cheek kisses, may in fact have critical influences on our social interactions, in an unconscious fashion.”

Nocera conducted the research with Joshua M. Ackerman, assistant professor of marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and John A. Bargh, professor of psychology at Yale.

“First impressions are liable to be influenced by the tactile environment, and control over this environment may be especially important for negotiators, pollsters, job seekers, and others interested in interpersonal communication,” the authors wrote in the latest issue of Science. “The use of ‘tactile tactics’ may represent a new frontier in social influence and communication.”

The researchers conducted a series of experiments probing how objects’ weight, texture, and hardness can unconsciously influence judgments about unrelated events and situations:

• To test the effects of weight, metaphorically associated with seriousness and importance, subjects used either light or heavy clipboards while evaluating resumes. They judged candidates whose resumes were seen on a heavy clipboard as better qualified and more serious about the position, and rated their own accuracy at the task as more important.
• An experiment testing texture’s effects had participants arrange rough or smooth puzzle pieces before hearing a story about a social interaction. Those who worked with the rough puzzle were likelier to describe the interaction in the story as uncoordinated and harsh.
• In a test of hardness, subjects handled either a soft blanket or a hard wooden block before being told an ambiguous story about a workplace interaction between a supervisor and an employee. Those who touched the block judged the employee as more rigid and strict.
• A second hardness experiment showed that even passive touch can shape interactions. Subjects seated in hard or soft chairs engaged in mock haggling over the price of a new car. Subjects in hard chairs were less flexible, showing less movement between successive offers. They also judged their adversaries in the negotiations as more stable and less emotional.

Nocera and his colleagues say these experiments suggest that information acquired through touch exerts broad, if generally imperceptible, influence over cognition. They propose that encounters with objects can elicit a “haptic mindset,” triggering application of associated concepts even to unrelated people and situations.

“People often assume that exploration of new things occurs primarily through the eyes,” Nocera said. “While the informative power of vision is irrefutable, this is not the whole story. For example, the typical reaction to an unknown object is usually as follows: With an outstretched arm and an open hand, we ask, ‘Can I see that?’ This response suggests the investigation is not limited to vision, but rather the integrative sum of seeing, feeling, touching, and manipulating the unfamiliar object.”

Nocera said that because touch appears to be the first sense that people use to experience the world -- for example, by equating the warm and gentle touch of a mother with comfort and safety -- it may provide part of the basis by which metaphorical abstraction allows for the development of a more complex understanding of comfort and safety. This physical-to-mental abstraction is reflected in metaphors and shared linguistic descriptors, such as the multiple meanings of words like “hard,” “rough,” and “heavy.”

Nocera, Ackerman, and Bargh’s work was supported by the Sloan School of Management at MIT and by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Tags: Psychology, touch, research, objects, Steve Bradt, How touch can influence judgments, Harvard Gazette, Christopher C. Nocera, Joshua M. Ackerman, MIT, Sloan School of Management, John A. Bargh, tactile environment