Touch is a Touchy Topic (Part-II)
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Categories of Touch
- Functional/professional – expresses task-orientation
- Social/polite – expresses ritual interaction
- Friendship/warmth – expresses the idiosyncratic relationship
- Love/intimacy – expresses emotional attachment
- Sexual/arousal – expresses sexual intent
The intent of touch is sometimes exclusive, and touching
can evolve into each one of the categories.
Managers should be aware that touch can be misinterpreted
while speaking with subordinates. A hand on the shoulder can be encouraging or
sexual for different people. Managers must know people's touch tolerance when
communicating.
Henley (1977) observed that a superior is more likely to
touch a subordinate, but the subordinate cannot reciprocate. According to
Borisoff and Victor, touch is a powerful nonverbal communication tool, and the different
standards between superiors and subordinates can confuse whether the contact is
dominant or tender.
Walton wrote in his book that touching is the ultimate indication of closeness or confidence between two people, but rarely seen in business or professional relationships. Touching emphasizes the initiator's specific message. “If a touch on the shoulder accompanies a word of praise, that is the gold star on the ribbon,” Walton wrote.
Social/Polite
Culture blurs haptic categories. Touching the forearm is
polite in many US states, and this is only sometimes acceptable in the Midwest.
Professional interactions frequently begin with a handshake.
Handshakes reveal a person's character. Chiarella (2006) authored an Esquire
magazine piece for men about how handshakes convey nonverbal messages. He said
holding the grasp for over two seconds would stop the verbal discourse, and thus, the nonverbal will take over.
Jones described touch communication as the most intimate and
involved, helping people maintain strong relationships. Yarbrough studied touch
sequences and individual touches.
Repetitive and strategic touch sequences exist. Touching and
reciprocating are redundant, and positive touches predominate. Strategic touching
is a sequence of touches with a concealed purpose to convince someone to do
something for them.
Single touches outnumber sequential touches. They must be
read in terms of what was spoken, the connection, and the social setting
when the person was touched.
Yarbrough mapped out touch, and she designated
"touchable" body parts. All body regions save the hand, arm,
shoulder, and upper back are vulnerable.
Civil inattention means not talking to strangers or
responding to their touch. Goffman explains this using a lift study. People
rarely gaze at, communicate with, or touch one another. While it may be so crowded
that they "touch" another person, they will typically remain
expressionless, not to influence others.
Friendship/Warmth
Women are more allowed to touch than males in social
situations, probably due to the toucher's authority over the felt. Whitcher
and Fisher examined gender differences in therapeutic touch to alleviate
anxiety. A nurse was instructed to touch patients for one minute while they
read a booklet during a preoperative treatment. Females liked the touch, but
men did not. Males equated touch with inferiority or dependence.
Family touch affects behaviour. Family dynamics are complex, and parents are touchless when children get older.
Boys leave home earlier than girls. Same-sex parents touch
more.
Women prefer men to touch, but their touching other guys
excites them, according to a nonverbal communication study of men
"conversing" in bars. Men who touch people are seen as more powerful
and respected.
The study indicated that women were more responsive to males who requested the most social space, and when a lady entered a bar, men moved their drinks far apart to show her that they had space in their "domain" for her.
Love/Intimacy
Touch affects interpersonal interactions the most.
Personal relationships involve more touching.
Three areas of public touch between couples have been
studied: the amount of touch in the early stages of a romantic relationship,
how much touching goes on between the couple, the extent of touching with men
and women displayed, who initiated the touch, and when.
Public touch might signal that your partner is
"taken". Holding hands and wrapping arms around one other is a
"tie sign" indicating a relationship. Burgoon, Buller, and Woodall
found that dating and courting couples use "tie signs" more than
married couples.
Sexes also touch differently. Men obey gender norms at the
beginning of a relationship. Patterson found that males in this social role
touched more, and women touched more after the initial touch in casual
relationships and as the connection became more intimate in serious dating or
marriage. Men still "make the first move" in dating in America.
Healthy couples touch. In research by University of Virginia
psychologist Jim Coan stressed that women found immediate relief by holding
their husband's hands. When the woman was happily married, this worked.
b) Violence
Intimate touch can be violent. McEwan and Johnson divide
relationship violence into intimate terrorism and regular couple violence.
Intimate terrorism involves controlling or dominating a relationship,
escalation, high frequency, and intensity. However, a slight dispute often
leads to pair violence. Couple violence is rare, intense, and does not
escalate. Intimate terrorism differs from partner violence in two ways. A
couple violence occurs in episodes. In 1999, Geiser found that males are likelier
to commit nonverbal hostility and violence. The National Domestic Violence
Hotline and National Violence Prevention Network can support victims of violent
domestic relationships.
Sexual/Arousal
According to Givens (1999), the process of nonverbal
communication or negotiation is to send and receive messages to gain someone’s
approval or love. Courtship, which may lead to love, is defined as a nonverbal
message designed to attract sexual partners. During courtship, we exchange
nonverbal communication gestures for telling each other to come nearer and
nearer until we touch. Essential signals in the path to intimacy include facial
nuzzles, kissing and caressing each other.
Courtship has five phases which include the attention phase,
recognition phase, conversation phase, touching phase, and the love-making
phase. Haptics takes place more during the last two phases.
The touching phase:
- First
touch: Is likely to be more “accidental” than premeditated by touching a
neutral body part and where the recipient either accepts the touch or
rejects it through body movement.
- Hugging:
The embrace is the most basic way of telling someone that you love them
and possibly need them too.
- Intention
to touch: A nonverbal communication haptic code or cue is the intention
behind it. Reaching your hand across the table to a somewhat unknown
person is used as a way to show readiness to touch.
- Kissing:
Moving in concert by turning heads to allow for the lips to touch is the
final part of the fourth stage of courtship, the kiss.
- The
final phase, love-making, includes tactile stimulation during foreplay,
known as the light or protopathic touch. Any feelings of fear or
apprehension may be calmed through other touching like kissing, nuzzling,
and a gentle massage.
18 Meanings of Touch
Touch research conducted by Jones and Yarbrough (1985)
revealed 18 different meanings of touch, grouped into seven types: Positive
affect (emotion), playfulness, control, ritual, hybrid (mixed), task-related,
and accidental touch.
Positive Affect
These touches communicate positive emotions and occur mostly
between persons with close relationships. These touches can be further
classified as support, appreciation, inclusion, sexual interest or intent, and
affection.
- Support:
Serve to nurture, reassure, or promise protection. These touches generally
occur in situations that either virtually require or make it clearly
preferable that one person show concern for another experiencing
distress.
- Appreciation:
Express gratitude for something another person has done.
- Inclusion:
Draw attention to the act of being together and suggest psychological
closeness.
- Sexual:
Express physical attraction or sexual interest.
- Affection:
Express generalized positive regard beyond mere acknowledgement of the
other.
Playful
These touches serve to lighten an interaction. These touches
communicate a double message since they always involve a play signal, either
verbal or nonverbal, which indicates the behaviour is not to be taken seriously.
These touches can be further classified as affectionate and aggressive.
Playful affection: Serve to lighten interaction. The
seriousness of the positive message is diminished by the play signal. These
touches indicate teasing and are usually mutual.
Playful aggression: Like playful affection, these touches are
used to serve to lighten interaction. However, the play signal indicates
aggression, and these touches are initiated rather than mutual.
Control
These touches direct the recipient's behaviour, attitude, or
feeling state. The key feature of these touches is that almost
all of the touches are initiated by the person who attempts to influence them. These
touches can be further classified as compliance, attention-getting, and
announcing a response.
- Compliance:
Attempts to direct another person's behaviour and often, by implication, influence attitudes or feelings.
- Attention-getting:
Serve to direct the touch recipient’s perceptual focus toward something.
- Announcing
a response: Call attention to and emphasize a feeling state of the initiator;
implicit requests affect the response from another.
Ritualistic
These touches consist of greeting and departure touches, and they serve no other function than to help make transitions in and out of
focused interaction.
- Greeting:
Serve as part of acknowledging another at the opening of an
encounter.
- Departure:
Serve as a part of the act of closing an encounter
Hybrid
These touches involve two or more of the meanings described
above. These touches can be further classified as greeting/affection and
departure/affection.
- Greeting/affection:
Express affection and acknowledgement of the initiation of an encounter
- Departure/affection:
Express affection and serve to close an encounter
Task-related
These touches are directly associated with the performance
of a task. These touches can be further classified as:
- Reference
to appearance: Point out or inspect a body part or artefact referred to in
a verbal comment about appearance
- Instrumental
ancillary: Occur as an unnecessary part of the accomplishment of a task
- Instrumental
intrinsic: Accomplish a task in and out of itself, i.e., a helping touch.
Accidental
These touches are perceived as unintentional, have no
meaning, and consist mainly of brushes. Research by Martin in a retailing
context found that male and female shoppers who were accidentally touched from
behind by other shoppers left a store earlier than people who had not been
touched and evaluated brands more negatively, resulting in the Accidental
Interpersonal Touch effect.
Culture
The amount of touching within a culture is
largely based on the culture's relative high or low context.
High Contact
In a high-contact culture, many things are not verbally
stated but are expressed through physical touch. For instance, Cheek kissing is a very common method of greeting in Latin America, but among European
individuals, it is unique form of greeting. Different cultures have
different display rules, the degree to which emotions are expressed. Cultural
display rules also affect the degree to which individuals share their personal
space, gaze and physical contact during interactions. In a High contact culture,
such as South America, Latin America, Southern Europe, Africa, Russia, the Middle
East and others, people tend to share more physical contact. High-contact
cultures communicate through long gazes and long hugs and share a decrease in
proxemics, etc.
Low Contact
Low-contact cultures such as The United States, Canada,
Northern Europe, Australia & New Zealand and Asia prefer infrequent
touching, larger physical distance, indirect body orientations (during
interaction), and little share gazes. In Thai culture, kissing a
friend on the Cheek is less common than in Latin America. Remland and
Jones (1995) studied groups of people communicating and found that in England
(8%), France (5%) and the Netherlands (4%), touching was rare compared to the
Italian (14%) and Greek (12.5%) sample.
Internal Differences
The frequency of touch also varies significantly between
different cultures. Harper refers to several studies, one of which examined
touching in coffee houses. During a one-hour sitting, 180 touchings were
observed for Puerto Ricans, 110 for French, none for English and 2 for
Americans. (Harper, 297). To know if someone was touching more
frequently than normal, it would be necessary to first understand what is normal in
that culture. In high-touch countries, a kiss on the Cheek is considered a
polite greeting, while in Sweden, it may be regarded as presumptuous. Jandt
relates that two men holding hands will, in some countries, be a sign of friendly
affection, whereas, in the United States, the same tactile code would probably be
interpreted as a symbol of homosexual love (85).
Emotion and Touch
Recently, researchers have shown that touch communicates
distinct emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, sympathy, love, and
gratitude. Moreover, the accuracy with which subjects could express their emotions was commensurate with facial and vocal displays of
emotion.
Thus, understanding these categories and meanings of touch will definitely help us to touch consciously, cautionary and skillfully.
Remember!
Touch is a very touchy topic.
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