Printed Page 223

Communicating Through Touch

Using touch up to communicate nonverbally is known as haptics, from the ancient Greek word haptein. Touch is likely the first sense we develop in the womb, and receiving touch is a critical part of infant development (Knapp & Hall, 2002). Infants deprived of affectionate touch walk and talk later than others and suffer impaired emotional development in adulthood (Montagu, 1971).

Touch can vary based on its duration, the part of the body being touched, and the strength of contact, and these varieties influence how we interpret the physical contact (Floyd, 1999). Scholars distinguish between six types of touch. We use functional-professional touch to accomplish some type of task. Examples include touch between physicians and patients, between teachers and students, and between coaches and athletes. Social-polite touch derives from social norms and expectations. The most common form of social-polite touch is the handshake, which has been practiced as a greeting in one form or another for over 2,000 years (Heslin, 1974). Other examples include light hugging between friends or relatives, and the light cheek kiss. We rely on friendship-warmth touch—for example, gently grasping a friend’s arm and giving it a squeeze—to express liking for another person. Love-intimacy touch—cupping a romantic partner’s face tenderly in your hands, giving him or her a big, lingering hug—lets you convey deep emotional feelings. Sexual-arousal touch, as the name implies, is intended to physically stimulate another person. Finally, aggressive-hostile touch involves forms of physical violence like grabbing, slapping, and hitting—behaviors designed to hurt and humiliate others.

Cultural upbringing has a strong impact on how people use and perceive touching. For example, many Hispanics use friendship-warmth touch more frequently than do Europeans and Euro-Americans. Researchers in one study monitored casual conversations occurring in outdoor cafés in two different locales: San Juan, Puerto Rico, and London, England. They then averaged the number of touches between conversational partners. The Puerto Ricans touched each other an average of 180 times per hour. The British average? Zero (Environmental Protection Agency, 2002).

Because people differ in the degree to which they feel comfortable giving and receiving touch, consider adapting your use of touch to others’ preferences, employing more or less touch depending on your conversational partner’s behavior responses to your touching. If you are talking with a “touchy” person, who repeatedly touches your arm gently while talking (a form of social-polite touch), you can probably presume that such a mild form of touch would be acceptable to reciprocate. But if a person offers you no touch at all, not even a greeting handshake, you would be wise to inhibit your touching.