I Wanna Hold Your Hand: Handholding is Subjectively Preferred to Stroking in Everyday Situations

Social touch is an important form of interpersonal emotion regulation. Two types of touch, C-touch (Slow stroking of skin with C-tactile afferents, such as the forearm) and handholding, have been extensively studied in the context of comforting touch. C-touch has been found to activate unique neural pathways associated with reward signaling, which suggests that it may be a preferable emotion regulation strategy. Notwithstanding, handholding is widely utilized in people’s everyday lives when seeking to regulate another person’s emotions. Here we sought to directly compare participants’ subjective preferences of touch type, in three studies. The studies involved participants imagining themselves in various positive and negative, physical and emotional situations and rating which type of touch (handholding, stroking, no touch) they would prefer. Study 1 (N=99) examined preferred type of touch to receive; Study 2 (N=101) examined touch reception and provision; and Study 3 (N=51) examined touch reception during injections (e.g., vaccine provision) in participants with blood\injection phobia. In all studies, participants preferred handholding over stroking, especially in intense situations. We propose that this preference, despite the unique neural pathways activated by slow stroking, might be due to handholding’s cultural ubiquity, due to it activating top-down regulation processes, or due to it inducing interpersonal synchrony.

Forms of Touch during Medical Encounters with an Advanced Heart Failure (AdHF) Doctor who Practices Relational Medicine

Within a participatory research project, we investigate how forms of touch we call caring touch are enacted in AdHF medical encounters. Through the theoretical lens of Relational Ontology (Raia, 2018), grounding multimodality in phenomenology, we identify various forms of caring touch. When occurring in conjunction with medical/diagnostic touch, especially in situations of a perceived patient’s vulnerability, caring touch facilitates passages from the person level to the organ, tissue, and gene levels and then back to the whole-person level in an uninterrupted movement, maintaining the person-person relation between doctor and patient. Gentle shepherding (Cekaite, 2010) is used to guide the patient body, and comforting touch (Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018) accompanies invitations to enter a space where death is part of living. We show the existential grounding power of caring touch, which constitutes forms of reciprocal sharing of existential experiences in caring-for-the-Other. All these forms of caring touch are employed by an AdHF doctor whose work centers on the practice of Relational Medicine (Raia and Deng, 2015b), in which the starting and returning point is the patient in his/her life. While providing a single case analysis, the research builds from a corpus of 500 hours of recorded medical encounters with 125 patients in high-tech medicine.

The Complex Journey of Traumatised Children: Discovering Safety in Order to Experience Comfort, Joy and Self-discovery

The neurological, psychological, emotional and social effects of abuse do not stop when the actual abuse has stopped. These affects are likely to be significant, pervasive, and long-lasting. Children who have experienced abuse at the hands of their parents tend to mistrust both their parents as well as subsequent carers who are making efforts to keep them safe. They avoid eye contact, comforting touch, reciprocal activities and communications that might facilitate a sense of safety and the development of a secure attachment. Those caring for such children need to find ways to patiently and gently help these children to begin to experience relaxed, reciprocal interactions with them along with the more intense experiences of comfort and joy.Finally, when children have begun to trust their carers, but are returned to those who previously abused them, only to be abused again, they are at high risk to have even greater difficulty learning to trust. These more severe symptoms secondary to repeated trauma then cause their subsequent carers much greater challenges in helping them to begin to trust once again. This places the carers at risk for developing blocked care which further compromises the child's psychological development.