Of course, it is next to impossible to do this kind of precise study of touch and the HPA axis in young humans. A recent study, though, indicates that touch reduces our stress-related physiology. Jim Coan and Richie Davidson had participants wait for a painful burst of white noise—a source of stress—while resting in a fMRI scanner and having images of their brain taken. For the control participants, this stressful period of waiting triggered activation in the amygdala. These participants were showing a well-replicated brain reaction to threat. Other participants waited for the burst of white noise while their romantic partner touched their arm. These participants showed no amygdala response to the threat. Touch turned off the threat switch in the brain.
Touch is woven into our daily exchanges. Pats on the back, handshakes, hands resting on shoulders and arms, and playful nudges are barely noticed as we move through the day. Yet these touches alter others’ nervous systems toward patterns of activation more conducive to higher jen ratios. The stroking of touch-sensitive neurons in the skin sends signals to one reward region of the brain—the orbitofrontal cortex, which activates release of oxytocin and endorphins. At the same time, pleasurable touch reduces activation of the HPA axis, the provenance of stress and anxiety. To touch, Michelangelo said, is “to give life.”
TOUCH AND TRUST
Like many an American family, when our children were very young we had sleep arrangements that would leave a hunter-gatherer family, or their prim and proper Victorian counterpart, scratching their heads in disbelief. This was in part because we were torn between these two poles of sleep philosophy—the evolutionarily old and near-universal practice of family members sleeping in physical proximity to one another, and the Victorian innovation of making children sleep alone in dark rooms roiling with shadowy images of monsters and demons.
The product of such cultural ambivalence, we naturally arrived at elaborate bedtime rituals to get our two daughters to sleep. When they were quite young, say four and two, our bedtime ritual took an hour and involved the following: two and sometimes three fairy tales; two stories from my childhood, as long as I was younger than twelve and the stories involved some kind of mammal, some slapstick action on my part, and a subtle moral; one song for each daughter; and then patterns of sitting and lying next to each daughter. Of course one has only so many good stories to tell, and the best selection of the world’s fairy tales can only be so enthralling to the jangled parent’s imagination. Like many parents, I often was at wit’s end during this ritual, plagued by visions of walking out the front door and hitchhiking across the country, and resorting, as a way to pass the time, to counting the minutes until their puberty would cast me out of their room.
I was saved by touch. Toward the end of the nightly ritual my younger daughter, Serafina, who entered the world with outstretched hand before the crown of her head, preferred that I sit next to her bed, which I did reliably, and eventually with anticipation. The reason: She would gently stroke the back of my hair near the neck as she fell asleep. She was targeting a region near the top of my spinal cord, where the vagus nerve, loaded with oxytocin receptors, originates and, I am convinced, is stimulated by such patterns of touch. We were engaging in a trade with ancient evolutionary origins. I offered my protective presence as she finally closed her eyes and drifted into the dreamy quiet of the dark. She offered me the most pleasurable of touches to the back of my neck, a kind of touch that was as potent a trigger of my pro-social nervous system—the orbitofrontal cortex, oxytocin (the little I have), the vagus nerve—as I have ever experienced.
The right touch—not some uncle squeezing your cheeks purple or a bully giving you a twist to the arm—creates trust and long-term cooperative exchange. Through its rewarding features, touch can be a glue of trading relations between kith and kin. One of the first to document this systematically was Frans de Waal, who has studied the role of touch in the patterns of food exchange in chimpanzees. Sure enough, chimpanzees use touch as a reward, and as a means of asking for favors. De Waal observed over 5,000 instances of food sharing in captive chimpanzees, carefully noting the patterns of who shared with whom in the troop. Chimpanzees, like our hominid predecessors, have a strong urge to share and to avoid hoarding. De Waal found that chimps were much more likely to share with those who shared previously with them and with chimps who had groomed them earlier in the day. They systematically traded calories for touch.
The same is true of humans: touching triggers trust and generosity. In one study, participants were asked to sign a petition in support of a particular issue of local importance. Those participants who were touched signed 81 percent of the time. Those who were not touched during the request volunteered to sign at a rate of 55 percent. In a recent study, Robert Kurzban put a participant into the prisoner’s dilemma game, which gives participants the opportunity to compete or cooperate with a fellow player. As they were about to play the game, the experimenter lightly touched the participants on the back, creating an atmosphere of trust and generosity. This seemingly inconsequential act was enough to shift the frame of the game from one of competition to one of cooperation. Those participants who were touched were much more likely to cooperate.
It is not a coincidence that greeting rituals around the world systematically involve touch. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has catalogued greeting rituals with surreptitious photography in remote cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, New Guinea, and elsewhere. First contacts elicit, in ritualistic fashion, many of the tools that promote cooperation—submissive bows, smiles, open-handed gestures of cooperation. But they most systematically involve touch and skin-to-skin contact in various forms: handshakes, chest to chest embraces, and, in subtler forms than those used by rat dams and pups, varieties of kisses. Touching and trusting go hand in hand.
TOUCH AND THE SPREAD OF GOODNESS
If there is a consensus in the scientific study of morality and human goodness, it is that emotions like sympathy, love, and gratitude are the engines of everyday jen. For Charles Darwin, sympathy was a cardinal moral emotion.
Buoyed by this claim, ten years ago I began a search to document the nonverbal displays of sympathy and gratitude. Both emotions involve a powerful concern for enhancing the welfare of others, and a willingness to subordinate the demands of self-interest in the service of another. For cooperation to spread in groups, the contagious goodness hypothesis would suggest, sympathy and gratitude should possess reliable and evocative signals, allowing group members to readily discern the cooperative intent of others and, when feeling altruistically inclined, evoke cooperative tendencies in others.
Evidence of distinct nonverbal displays of sympathy and gratitude would then justify the search for the evolutionary origins of these emotions in other primates and mammals, and in our nervous system as well. So I began my quest for the signs of these emotions by turning to what I knew best—the face. I concentrated on sympathy, confident that I would document a unique facial display of this emotion. This work was based on Nancy Eisenberg’s important finding that when people feel sympathy and are inclined to help others in need, they show a concerned eyebrow and pressed lip. When I presented images of this display to participants, and asked them to judge the emotion shown in the face, my hopes were dashed. Participants had only a faint idea what the person with the “sympathy face” was feeling. A few said compassion and sympathy, elevating my hopes. The majority, however, said things such as: she looked like she was concentrating or confused; still others volunteered answers like “she’s drunk or stoned” or “she’s constipated.” Those states certainly did not offer evolutionary clues about this most virtuous of emotions, sympathy.
So like a good emotion researcher, I turned to the next best studied modality of emotional communication—the voice. Here Emiliana Simon-Thomas and I had twenty-two different individuals utter sounds that they would normally use to communicate a variety of different emotions, including sympathy, love, and gratitude. We achieved modest, but unremarkable, success: When I presented
these vocalizations of sympathy, love, and gratitude to a pool of participants and asked them to judge the emotions in each voice, about 50 percent correctly identified the vocalizations of sympathy as communicating that emotion. They had no idea, however, what to make of the vocalizations of love and gratitude. The most pro-social of the emotions did not seem to register in the face and voice.
Accuracy rates in judging vocal bursts of emotion.
Thankfully, graduate students wander into my lab with interests I’ve never imagined. Matt Hertenstein, now a professor at DePauw University, suggested that we look at touch. Perhaps it is with touch that we convey these most pro-social emotions so critical to jen and the spread of goodness to others. Certainly studies of touch and the orbitofrontal cortex, oxytocin, reduced amygdala response, and reduced cortisol would suggest so. Perhaps William James was right in his observation that “Touch is both the alpha and omega of affection.” So Matt and I designed an experiment motivated by a simple question: Can we communicate sympathy, love, and gratitude through touch?
Clearly, the more general requirements of the study were straightforward—one person, the toucher, would be given the task of communicating sympathy, love, and gratitude and other emotions to another person—the touchee. The touchee would only be able to rely on tactile information in discerning the emotion conveyed in each touch. Our first version of the study was a disaster. In this version, our touchee sat blindfolded with earplugs in a lab room. The toucher was given a list of twelve emotions, including sympathy, gratitude, and love, and asked to touch the blindfolded individual, in any fashion within reason, to communicate these emotions. The touchee, who sat in a state of sensory deprivation, knew of the list of twelve emotions that were soon to descend upon his or her skin, and had the task of picking a term that best matched the touch that was just delivered.
The study more resembled a piece of performance art than science. One set of participants acting as the touchee found it to be a form of torture, sitting silently in a sightless and soundless world, ready to be poked in anger or soothingly stroked in compassion. Another portion of students, usually males, found the study to be exhilarating. I have the strong sense they would have paid good money to sit blindfolded and have female participants touch them to communicate love and gratitude.
So we turned to a primitive technology. We built a large barrier in a lab room, a wall to separate toucher and touchee. Part of this barrier included an opaque black curtain. The curtain prevented any kind of communication between toucher and touchee—visual, auditory, olfactory—other than touch. First, both toucher and touchee reviewed the list of twelve emotions: anger, disgust, embarrassment, envy, fear, happiness, pride, sadness, surprise, and the three of interest—sympathy, love, and gratitude. The touchee bravely put his or her arm through the curtain and awaited twelve different touches, randomly ordered. For each touch, the touchee guessed which emotion was being communicated. The toucher could only make contact with the touchee’s arm from elbow to hand to signal each emotion, using any form of touch. The touchee could not see any part of the touch because his or her arm was positioned on the toucher’s side of the curtain.
Our measure of interest, represented in the table below, was the proportion of participants selecting the appropriate term to label the touch. As you can see, people can reliably communicate well-studied emotions such as anger, disgust, or fear with a one-or two-second touch of another’s forearm. Quite astonishing, really, was how well strangers could communicate sympathy, love, and gratitude with one-second touches to a stranger’s forearm. Just as interesting were the emotions that our participants could not readily communicate with touch, such as embarrassment and pride, which are founded upon a sense of how others regard the self.
PRIMARY CHOICE
SECONDARY CHOICE
WELL-STUDIED EMOTIONS
ANGER
57
DISGUST
15
DISGUST
63
ANGER
10
FEAR
51
ANGER
14
SADNESS
16
SYMPATHY
35
SURPRISE
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 s
oothe, 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.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 20
