Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Thankfully, the benefits of touching are not limited to rat pups. Scientists have found, for example, that depressed mothers who are encouraged to touch their infants regularly and to massage them experience reduced symptoms of depression and begin to play more with their children. Elderly individuals who volunteer to give massages to infants report reductions in anxiety and depression and enhanced well-being.

Humans, then, are blessed with an inexhaustible resource of rewards—touch. Through millisecond touches in our daily living, we can provide pleasure, reward, and encouragement to others. Experimental studies have found that when teachers are randomly assigned to touch some of their students and not others with friendly pats on the back, those students who receive the rewarding touch are nearly twice as likely to volunteer comments in class. When medical doctors are experimentally assigned to touch some patients but not others, those patients who are touched in a warm fashion estimate the visit with their doctor to be two times longer than those patients who go untouched. Students touched by librarians while checking out books indicated a much more favorable attitude toward that bastion of good undergraduate fun—the library—than students who were not casually touched by the librarian. Touch is the original contact high.

TOUCH TO THRIVE

 

In her excellent book Touch, Tiffany Field, the world’s leading investigator of touch, recounts a moving story about an incident in a nursing home for the elderly. Two elderly residents, a man and a woman, were found missing during the dinner hour. They were soon discovered in a small utility closet, embracing one another like old friends. The staff quickly deemed them “sex offenders” and prevented them from further contact. Isolated, they withdrew from friends and families. Within weeks they were dead.

It is not a stretch beyond rigorous empirical evidence to claim that touch is essential to our physical and mental vitality. Some of the earliest systematic observations on this theme came from studies of orphanages, where only seventy-five years ago mortality rates for infants hovered between 50 and 75 percent. In one, run by a warm, friendly, affectionate German woman, the infants thrived. In another, where the children received no touch, the orphans were undernourished, sickly, and more likely to die. In a more systematic comparison, Renée Spitz assessed how well infants were doing at two orphanages, one in which female convicts served as mother surrogates, the other a foundling home. In both the infants were given food and clothing and kept clean. The foundlings had better access to medical services and were kept in a cleaner environment, but they were deprived of touch. They fared worse in terms of life expectancy and cognitive development.

More controlled studies have yielded comparably striking results showing how critical touch is to thriving. Tiffany Field has found that massages given to premature babies lead, on average, to a 47 percent increase in weight gain. In another study, thirty human infants were observed in the course of a painful heel lance procedure, in which the infants’ heels were cut by medical doctors. Some of the infants were held by their mothers in whole-body, skin-to-skin contact. Others underwent the procedure while swaddled in a crib. The infants who were touched during the procedure cried 82 percent less than the comparison infants, they grimaced 65 percent less, and they had lower heart rate during the procedure.

Touch alters not only our stress-related physiology but the development of the underlying physiological systems that render the human stress response more labile and strong. Responses to stress are governed by two populations of neurons in the central nervous system. One population in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus projects to the anterior pituitary, which produces the adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH) that causes the release from the adrenal gland of the stress hormone glucocorticoid. The second population of neurons resides in the amygdala and projects to a region known as the locus ceruleus, which, when stimulated, leads to the release of noradrenaline. These respective neural populations ultimately stimulate the liver, the heart and circulatory system, and different organs. These organs then kick into action (for example, the liver increases glucose output to maintain stable blood sugar levels) to support stress-related behavior.