Reach out and touch.........

 

This is dedicated to people who love to touch things -- cashmere, angora, towels and sheets, down comforters;  to people who love to pet cats, dogs and other mammals -- and to massage therapists the world over, who help restore touch to our beleaguered senses.

 

 

 

 

People love to touch things --soft things, fuzzy things, rough things. I work in a department store and people (myself included) love to touch the towels, comforters and sheets.

 

I wondered if other primates loved to touch things -- if we let monkeys loose in a department store, would they touch towels, comforters and sheets? Probably. On busy days, I'm positive monkeys are running around in the store.

Apparently, touch is  important to our development. This is actually not news to me, but I thought I'd share some of what I've found on Google with you.

 

 

 

 

 

People and other primates, especially apes, have a highly developed sense of touch. Meissner's corpuscles are the tactile receptors found in our skin, (especially in the hands and feet) and is correlated with tactile sensitivity.

 

 

 

 

Apes also have highly developed Meissner's corpuscles; these are found in the skin of all primates, but they are more developed in people and apes.

Research has shown that touch is essential for human emotional and physical development. The landmark Harlow studies from the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated the effects that deprivation of touch had on Rhesus monkeys.

In these experiments, Rhesus infants were taken from their natural mothers and given surrogate mothers. Some were given a wire 'mother'; other infants were given a cloth 'mother.' The wire 'mother' also had food, whereas the cloth 'mother' did not.

Did the infants go to the mother with food? No. The monkeys preferred the cloth 'mother.' The finding that 'touch' is more important than 'food' in promoting attachment to parents was novel and surprising, at the time.

Harlow also observed that Rhesus infants denied a 'secure base' of 'mother' failed to explore their environment. Harlow observed that the Rhesus mother or mother surrogate (cloth mother) represented the secure base that the Rhesus infants needed for development.

More studies showed that touch is more important than any other form of maternal bonding. The Rhesus infants could see, hear and smell their natural mothers. Yet, without touching their mothers, the Rhesus infants failed to explore their environments.

They failed to thrive.

These experiments became well known for other findings, as well. Monkeys that were raised with the touch-deprivation of their mothers tended to avoid most social contact; when they did become involved in social interactions, they became 'hyper aggressive', and some developed abnormal sexual behavior.

Female Rhesus monkeys that had a history of separation from their mother in infancy and childhood were found to be at risk for neglecting their own infants, without a network of increased social support.

Longitudinal studies generations of Rhesus monkeys showed that the amount of time a mother Rhesus monkey spends with her infant is correlated with the amount of time she spent with her own mother.

But there is hope for the Rhesus monkey that was denied contact from his/her mother.

Studies were done in whihch touch was restored to the Rhesus monkeys that had been so deprived; these monkeys were reintroduced to tactile contact -- they had several months of contact with other monkeys -- in groups that included mother monkeys, peer monkeys, younger peers, and  foster grandparent monkeys.

The abnormal behaviors of the Rhesus monkeys diminished, considerably so.

Studies done with rat mothers and pups focused on the biochemical changes that touch deprivation between mother rat and pup causes; results showed that  growth hormone and stress hormones were considerably reduced in these rat pups so denied.

In contrast, rats that the researchers had handled as infants showed less fear as adults, as well as a more positive immune response and a greater memory than did the rats that had been deprived of maternal contact.

More Rhesus studies showed that infants that had been raised without mothers for the first few months of life had immunological deficits that remained after touch therapy reversed the behavioral problems.

Researchers then measured the amount of time in grooming behavior that an infant monkey gets during its first six months of life and its later ability to produce specific immune antibodies.

The greater the amount of time spent grooming, the greater ability the Rhesus infant had in producing adequate amounts of specific antibodies, one of the important measures of immune function.

More recent research has shown that the therapeutic power of touch, whether to Rhesus infants or to people of any age, produces an immune response in the skin that may help moderate the destructive effects that the lack of earlier touch may have had on development.