Touching and Being Touched

[xoxoxoBruce]

Touching and Being touched, may spur warm and fuzzy thoughts of a lover... or three. But what about others, friends, family, cow orkers, strangers? Personally I don't like people touching me, other than very, very, very close... eh, make that lovers. Other than my grandmother rubbing my upper back, no memories of touching that made me comfortable. I've had friends who were very physical, who would throw their arm around you without a second thought. I was always keenly aware of where they were in relation to my personal space, all the time, like I'm aware of where other drivers are in relation to me on the road.
Now you're saying, what the fuck is he babbling about? Patience Grasshopper, the point shall be revealed.



The Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, School of Science, Aalto University, Finland; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; Department of Computer Science, Aalto University; and Turku PET Centre and Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland (say that 3 times fast), have published the results of a study. (pdf)
It's pretty detailed in a 8x10-charts-with-a-paragraph-on-the-back, sort of way. Stuff like acceptable touching by others in relation to how long since you've seen them, and stuff.

Nonhuman primates use social touch for maintenance and reinforcement of social structures, yet the role of social touch in human bonding in different reproductive, affiliative, and kinshipbased relationships remains unresolved. Here we reveal quantified, relationship-specific maps of bodily regions where social touch is allowed in a large cross-cultural dataset (N = 1,368 from Finland, France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom).

Participants were shown front and back silhouettes of human bodies with a word denoting one member of their social network. They were asked to color, on separate trials, the bodily regions where each individual in their social network would be allowed to touch them. Across all tested cultures, the total bodily area where touching was allowed was linearly dependent (mean r2 = 0.54) on the emotional bond with the toucher, but independent of when that
person was last encountered.

Close acquaintances and family members were touched for more reasons than less familiar individuals. The bodily area others are allowed to touch thus
represented, in a parametric fashion, the strength of the relationship-specific emotional bond. We propose that the spatial patterns of human social touch reflect an important mechanism supporting the maintenance of social bonds.

Since all the guinea pigs were from those five countries in Europe, the results using people from the New World, Down Under, or Asia, could reflect different cultural habits and mores. So your mileage may vary.