Haptic communication

Haptic communication refers to the ways in which people and other animals communicate and interact via the sense of touch. As well as providing information about surfaces and textures, touch, or the haptic sense, is a component of communication in interpersonal relationships that is nonverbal and nonvisual. Touch is extremely important for humans and is vital in conveying physical intimacy. Haptics is a branch of nonverbal communication.

Touch can be categorized in terms of meaning as positive, playful, control, ritualistic, task-related or unintentional. It can be both sexual (kissing is one such example that is sometimes sexual) and platonic (such as hugging or tickling). Touch is the earliest sense to develop in the fetus. The development of an infant's haptic senses and how it relates to the development of the other senses such as vision has been the target of much research. Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can perceive through touch, even without sight and hearing, tend to fare much better.

In chimpanzees the sense of touch is highly developed. As newborns they see and hear poorly but cling strongly to their mothers. Harry Harlow conducted a controversial study involving rhesus monkeys and observed that monkeys reared with a "terry cloth mother", a wire feeding apparatus wrapped in softer terry cloth which provided a level of tactile stimulation and comfort, were considerably more emotionally stable as adults than those with a mere wire mother. Touching is treated differently from one country to another. Socially acceptable levels of touching varies from one culture to another. In the Thai culture, touching someone's head may be considered to be rude. 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.

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