No word on the house yet. Had to wear my mules today since I kicked the tub faucet yesterday morning and sliced open my heel. Got my external drive and laptop back thanks to Meow picking them up on his way in. Just gotta reinstall my laptop, find a way of syncing my laptop and external drive and then start recovering my pictures. I grabbed the few I had up on cafepress. Flickr and Shutterfly will take longer since I have a LOT there. A lot of it is overlap, but not all of it. The only recipe I think I might have lost that I want to recover is the pepper cookie one from the Princess.
Some good articles on touch on Psychology Today:
You Can Touch This
A parent or infant’s touch can convey emotion as well as a facial expression or spoken word.
By: Matthew Hutson
“At birth, touch is the most developed sense. But scientists have always thought touch conveys only a general positive or negative affect. According to a paper in the journal Emotion, touch can communicate distinct emotions—about as well as faces or voices. People “expressed” 12 emotions to a stranger who had put his arm through a curtain. Recipients guessed six of the emotions well above chance, scoring between 48 and 83 percent. MC Hammer didn’t know what he was missing.”
Touching News
An interview with Tiffany Field, founder of Touch Research Institutes, explains why healing is all in our hands.
By: Nancy K. Dess
The good bits:
What are some of massage therapy’s important effects?
Babies gain more weight, sleep better and relate better to parents. Their brain waves indicate more alertness, and they learn faster. Kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism also become more attentive. MT alleviates depression, too. It decreases stress hormones and increases serotonin, the body’s own antidepressant. It also improves sleep. That relates, I think, to MT’s alleviation of pain syndromes, such as fibromyalgia and migraine, which seem to be exacerbated by sleep disorders.
MT also alters the immune system. In autoimmune problems such as asthma, lung functions improve and asthma attacks decrease. Immune cell counts improve in people with HIV. In a breast cancer study, natural killer cells are increasing, which is good, because they kill cancer cells. The list goes on.
Any practical advice to offer?
Everybody needs to either get massaged by a therapist or a significant other, or self-massage by doing yoga or using a long-handled shower brush. Being touched in this way is as important as proper diet and exercise, and should be part of one’s regular daily activities.
What happens when people don’t get their share of touch?
Touch deprivation impairs development. Romanian nursery children, for example, were stunted, and MT helped them grow. Interestingly, nonhuman animals that are touch-deprived not only lose weight but become aggressive. In a study of 49 non-industrialized cultures, groups showing physical affection toward children had little adult violence; in groups that were less affectionate to kids, adults were significantly more violent.
Bonobos, an ape closely related to us, live in intimate physical contact with each other—and they’re pacifists.
That’s fascinating. This principle seems to apply generally. In a study, we found that there exists more physical affection toward children and less aggression among adults in France than in the United States. The power of touch in our lives seems rooted in our nature, as individuals and as social beings.