The truth about teaching and touching. | Goliath Business News

[archerships]

Touching is the most intense channel of nonverbal communication and the one most people are reluctant to discuss. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, giving and receiving love and affection is a foundation element. It is like the sun in the midst of the solar system--everything else revolves around it. Touch is one manifestation of the love and consideration that all people need in order to survive. Love and touch are indivisible (Key, 1975; Montagu, 1971; Montagu & Matson, 1979). Throughout people's lives, "touch is no short-lived event, finished when a hand is removed from the person, but rather is perceived as part of one's history, an event of real magnitude, effecting some permanent change" (Henley, 1973, p. 96).

If touch is so important, why is it so relatively rare in the United States? According to anthropologists, the United States is a non-tactile society. In fact, compared with cultures around the world, the mainstream U.S. citizen seems to be "touchy" about touching. French parents touch their children three times more often than do U.S. parents. Men in the Middle East, Korea, China, and Indochina walk arm-and-arm or hold hands without any homosexual undertones. Jewish men are very tactile; they often embrace and kiss. Puerto Rican couples might touch approximately 180 times in an hour; French pairs touch 110 times; couples in Florida touch twice; and couples in London don't touch at all (Axtell, 1991; Colt, 1997; Jourard, 1983; Montagu & Matson, 1979).

via goliath.ecnext.com

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[tieuthu.livejournal.com]

"Puerto Rican couples might touch approximately 180 times in an hour"
Sounds like an out-of-context statistic to me, and exactly from which one of the three sources quoted?

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Also, although the point of that paragraph seems to be to say that Americans don't touch each other, there's no data cited about the US other than a claim about relative amounts of touching between parents and children. How often to American couples touch? (And are Puerto Rican couples not American?) It seems implausible that couples in London don't touch at all - perhaps they watched a small sample of couples for an hour in a particular sort of context and they touched very few times?

Also, "Jewish men are very tactile"? Do they mean "Israeli men"? If they really mean Jewish men, then they should notice that most Jewish men are Americans. (Well, Israel has slightly more, but those numbers are very close.)

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those are all very interesting questions. I would wager that the cited papers go into more detail.

[radiantsun.livejournal.com]

That explains why I liked dating jews . . .