A child first learns to recognise their body through skin and touch. Touch creates a sense of security and trust, and has a fundamentally calming effect. Touch activates the orbitofrontal cortex, which is linked to feelings of compassion, empathy, self-awareness and determination. Basic gentle touch can calm cardiovascular stress and activate the vagus nerve. Dr Dacher Keltner, an American psychologist, conducted a study in which subjects were asked to identify through touch alone the emotion being communicated by another person whom they could neither see nor hear. 60% of subjects recognised compassion and 50% identified gratitude, anger, love or fear. Given the number of possible emotions, there was only an 8% chance that the person would identify the correct emotion. Which means that touch communicates. It is a language in its own right. This is why insufficient or inadequate sensory stimulation in early childhood can have such a negative effect. I wrote an article for the humanities magazine Anima, focusing on the importance of touch for each and every one of us. Its title translates as “Touch Builds Bridges Between Us”, and you can read more about it here (Slovenian only).
