Touch and aggression

[Beth Benoit]

Title: Touch and aggression

I attended a very thought-provoking lecture by Tiffany Field at the APA in Boston, and would like to pick a few TIPS-brains.  She covered her difficult-to-refute theories that massaging (touch therapy) premature infants translates into a 40% weight gain.  But her most provocative (to me) point was a tantalizing suggestion that Americans have more violence in our culture because we don't encourage touching. I am grossly oversimplifying, so will try to supply a few more points (and hope I'm generally accurate): Her research was conducted in Paris on playgrounds and at McDonald's, and then at similar locations in America.  She found that Parisian children and adolescents touch each other (stroking arms, putting arms on each others' shoulders, etc.) much more frequently than do Americans of the same age.  She found American adolescents were much more likely to perform "self-stim" behaviors such as flipping their hair (ah, America!  there's one I'd like to see die an early death), cracking knuckles and jiggling their heels.  She discussed how we give male children the message that it is NOT okay to touch others (particularly other males), but it IS okay, essentially, to be aggressive "if necessary." Before anyone spews forth the "correlation is not causation" stuff, of which I am well aware, please be aware that Dr. Field was careful not to make any global assumptions.   She is also an expert in her field and doesn't do sloppy research. Her talk was covered the next day in The Boston Globe. What say you?  I think it has tremendous social psych. possibilities.  Great stuff. But hey, I only met one other TIPSperson.  (Hi, Ann Thomas!)  Was anybody else there? Beth Benoit University of Massachusetts Lowell