Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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communication: E. Simon-Thomas, D. Sauter, and Dacher Keltner, “Vocal Bursts Communicate Distinct Positive Emotions,” unpublished manuscript.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.