Non Verbal Communication - Haptics

For my experiment I first had to find something small enough to not be overly inappropriate, but larger enough to get a reaction. I decided to do something that would irritate me. I noticed that among guys, it isn’t that, “touchy-feely,” there isn’t a lot of holding, hugging, or anything that isn’t a high-five or handshake, most of the guys would be very annoyed and surprised if someone got too feely, but while I am spending time with my girlfriend, it is a lot more of hugging, holding hands, and such. So, I decided to switch the norms, I would become very close and touchy feely with my guy friends, and avoid any type of physical contact with my girlfriend for one day and see how they would react.

If people have strong intimate relationships such as family members and friends, people hug or touch each other.

In my opinion, people are different because of their cultures and their norms. However, some people are more comfortable with touch than others. People shake hand in greeting but otherwise do not like to be touched at all, except by family members or lovers. For example, in North America culture, touch is interpreted as power or people with the opposite-sex can hold hands. But people in Asia, the Middle East, and South America have the opposite expectation, male friends or female friend can hold hands, but it is slightly shocking for an opposite-sex to touch in public. In Iran and Iraq, hands shakes between men and women are seen as improper.

While conducting the experiment, there were still a few challenging factors. It was reported that making eye contact with passerbys was relatively difficult. Most people were either occupied by their phones or directly avoided eye contact. This makes the willing passersby a selective group of individuals who were comfortable in exposing themselves at a level of

Clinically appropriate touch increases the client’s sense of trust, comfort and ease with the therapist. As a result touch is highly effective in enriching beneficial relationship between client and therapist. The meaning of touch can only be understood within the context of who the client is, the therapeutic relationship, and the setting. There are instances when the use of touch should be avoided for those clients who are highly paranoid, hostile, highly sexualized or who demand touch.

Women generally do not interact with males as they do with other females due to the partial loss of shared understandings concerning the dialog and contact between individuals. For example, there are aspects of a woman’s personality and being that she may be comfortable sharing with other women because of the assumption that they can relate to her, but that she may not be comfortable sharing with men due to the uncertainty surrounding his reaction to or perception of her or the expectation of a negative reaction to her.

Any behavioral psychologist knows that touch is extremely significant for human beings. It does, however, cause controversy at times, even with the physical contact of such things as a hug during psychotherapy sessions. In this case, six individuals were interviewed who had received the Alexander Technique, and 111 completed surveys. The data suggests that there is incompatibility between touch and the spoken word, touch is far more believable

When people think about communication they would tend to assume that means talking, literally. We are used to communicating with one another either through text or over the internet or even talking face to face with another person. Many people don’t think of gesturing as a way of communicating with others. Many species, not only humans use this gesturing as a way to extend their point or to get a point across to one another. They use this method because they either: ant communicate with one another because it would make them vulnerable or because they sue that as their only means of communication. In this essay I will show you how communication with one another can not only be verbal but non-verbal as well.

This study begins with the assumption based on previous research that touch is a gendered part of the way we communicate. The purpose is to discover differences in the ways different genders communicate different emotions through touch. The experiment was set up with two strangers in a room with a barrier between them. One participant had his or her hand and forearm on the other side of curtain. One person would be given the task of conveying a certain emotion to the other person through touching their hand and forearm. The researchers made hypotheses based on other research backed up by empirical data. Other studies have shown women to be more expressive of emotions and better at perceiving what other people are feeling. Females are also more likely to show and feel sympathy and happiness. Males are more likely to enter confrontational situations as well as show and feel anger. Males are also more likely to initiate physical contact and the more they think touch from a female stranger is sexual, the more they view it as welcoming. However, females who receive touch from a

For us it’s just a part of who we are. Including Dr. Eagleman, there is another who did a study on touch as well. His name is Dr. David Linden. He wrote the book “Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind” (Linden). Linden believes there are “two pathways in our brain for processing touch” (Gregoire). The “first is a sensatory pathway, which gives us the facts about touch -- like vibration, pressure, location and fine texture” (Gregoire). The second focuses on how we process the information we have discovered, mostly involving social and emotional

It is key for nurses to know how to use touch and in some cases patients will respond better to touch than trying to talk to them. Touching must be done appropriately, and it is up to the nurses to assess whether the patient would feel comfortable with them doing so. Not everyone would feel at ease with closeness and may feel their personal space imposed (Segal, 2016). Touch has also been found to be a very powerful tool when making a verbal desire and has been confirmed to increase the probability for the request to be carried out. For example, touching a patient while saying how important it is to take a particular medicine can make the patient more likely to comply.

It is believed that touch can communicate a wide range of specific emotions. Touch has been ignored

Third on his list is social touching. Social touching is distinguished as either friendly or sensual touching. Cooper gives us the example of, "a caressing hand laid gently on the employee," as a sensual

178) This apparent age-related decline in touch communication has led Western society into a mass state of touch depravation. (Richmond, 2012, p. 179) Research has found that body contact is less frequent among North

While communication via spoken word constitutes a large part of everyday life, there is another type of communication that often goes overlooked. This other form of communication, known as nonverbal communication, is arguably used more frequently on an everyday basis than verbal communication (Knapp, 2013). Yet, rather than the use of spoken words, nonverbal communication revolves around displaying body language and other visual cues to communicate efficiently with others. Nevertheless, it should be noted that while non-verbal communication can be an effective way of expression, it can also be misinterpreted or go undetected at times. Through an in-depth analysis of the literature, there is the common belief that gender differences exist in relation to nonverbal communication (Hall, 1979) In general, this paper touches on the gender differences witnessed through the sense of touch, the study of proxemics and kinesics, as well as through encoding and decoding abilities. While there is no definitive reasoning behind these differences, the research attempts to explain these variations in terms of social power and dominance. Specifically, the potential cause for these discrepancies may lie in the fact that men tend to perceive themselves as the dominant members of society, while women in turn accept their inferior status (Briton, 1995). For within the areas of nonverbal communication mentioned above, men tend to display more aggressive, territorial behaviors while women are