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**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** So the second pathway processes the social and emotional information, interpreting or determining more of the emotional content of the touch. So that pathway activates brain regions associated with social bonding, pleasure, and pain, which is the posterior insula. See, this is why when people ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How you feel. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Social bonding is interesting, especially around touch. Going back to the NBA and that study - I think that's so interesting how they can examine the congratulatory behaviors and the many ways that teammates touch one another to do that, whether it's a slap on the butt, a slap on the back, a high fi... |
\[23:55\] So it's a multi-faceted sort of thing, not just simply the touch, but to have that as an examination of whether or not they play better in the second half of the game or the season is really interesting, because what would happen if that team didn't ever touch? They'd play pretty poorly; they'd have not deep ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** You know, I'm gonna get sort of giddy as I talk about research, because it just blows my mind, like a kid in the candy store. So there is a researcher, a psychologist Matthew Herrnstein out of DePaul University, who's looked at some of this back in 2009. So what he discovered or demonstrated w... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what were the emotions? Like anger, distrust...? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I'm getting there, I'm getting there... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... Hey, I'm giddy too, sorry. \[laughter\] It's interesting. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Obviously, the participants were somewhat apprehensive, because I think we can be a bit touch-phobic as a culture or society, and we're not always necessarily used to touching strangers or friends. But what they discovered is that participants communicated eight distinct emotions: anger, fear,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. Okay. Some of those are very similar. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right, so anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness and sadness, with accuracy rates as high as 78%. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They're just good guessers. They're just good at guessing, that's all. I mean, it's limited options here, Mireille, so it can't be -- I'm just kidding. But could you imagine how you would differentiate between sympathy and sadness? Or gratitude and -- what was the other one...? I think it was happin... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Well, I think about it in terms of like loss, or grief. So how I would touch someone when I'm like "I'm so sorry." This sense of "Gosh, here's sympathy. You're going through this", as opposed to love. And then it's gonna pull back on that other system, of the pressure of it, and the way and th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I can't help but think about how touch is happening less at this very moment. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yes... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And not just simply because of a pandemic and all of that, but simply the distance too, with people not collocating for work, not collocating for exercise when it comes to team sports... There's probably not a lot of basketball happening in the public. Maybe in some private teams it might be happeni... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[28:12\] Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What I'm getting at though is what do we do then when we can't physically touch? What's a surrogate for touch in a world we can't literally touch? Or even in the case of people who are just distant, close friends, but can't touch physically? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, this is where we utilize other textures and other things. I think about baby blankets, like why do we give gifts -- everybody gets inundated with baby blankets when they're having a child, because it's like they're so soft, and they're cuddly, and they're warm... It's a good sensory expe... |
There was a researcher some years ago, back in the '50s I believe it was; his name was Harlow, and he did this research with monkeys. What he did is took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them to inanimate surrogate mothers, so two non-living things. One was a simple construction of wire and wood, a... |
Then he gave the wire mother a bottle of milk, but the cloth mother had nothing. In both conditions, what he found is that the infant monkeys spend more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother. When only the wire mother had food, the babies went to the wire mother to feed, and then immediate... |
So we can use these surrogates, and that's needed. This is why even some people look at -- and I'm not sure exactly all the research relative to this at present, but weighted blankets for individuals who struggle with autism. There's a way in which the pressure of the weighted blanket feels differently to their nervous... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm gonna start a new startup. This is gonna be like Grubhub, or something like that, where they are dispatched to go give hugs on a behalf to people. \[laughter\] Maybe that exists, I don't know... But you know, I think of it in moments of grief even; whenever something really bad happens to friend... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, and I think that this is really more challenging for many of us, given our current circumstances, in that we all have people that we love and care about, that we would like to be able to touch or embrace... That it isn't wise to do so, for one reason or another. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How familiar are you with emojis? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[laughs\] Yeah... Do I use them, you mean? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I suppose the psychology side of them. I think of the fist bump emoji, for example. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure, sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:10\] Or the beers cheers one, or a thumbs up, or the handshake or the clap - these are all touch-based -- especially the clap; you're touching yourself, but there's an auditory thing that happens. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's a response to congratulate. Like we had said, sort of like with the moneys here - you've got the surrogate... Those emojis act as surrogates. You've got the huggy face emoji even, where you -- maybe you feel to some degree hugged whenever you get the huggy, emotionally... Maybe you don't, I don... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I don't know the answer to that question, but it prompts ironically another question, and thinking about the way in which we've become so reactive around likes or non-likes, or all of these different ways that we get feedback on social media... Because they are the way in which we communicate,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Wow. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** So... Somebody can take a look at that more, and let me know... No, but I wanna go back to Harlow too as we're having this, because it highlights more of the role of touch in managing emotion. What he also did was look at the way in which the infants turn to this inanimate surrogate mother for... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. The infant monkey felt safe. It had trust for that surrogate mother. It associated its safety and emotional safety with that mother; there was clearly some sort of relationship. It felt protected, it didn't feel stressed, it didn't feel the effects of pain, so to speak. It can even teeter into... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right. So we're apt to be affected by not having somebody with us, or someone that can be there to walk alongside us, comfort us etc. I think about this in the very real experience of child birth... I mean, pretty painful, just a little bit. And I did it a couple of times. And I can vividly re... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:15\] It shows the power of awareness, right? |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and what you're focused on. Because you're focus - sure, you were in dual focuses; I'm sure you couldn't totally defocus from the pain... But you had a new focus that changed your awareness and broadened itm and allowed you to have an attachment to a different emotion and a different scenario tha... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. And I had help. It literally wasn't something I could have provided to myself at that time. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's true too, because you'd have to be amazing - which you are amazing - but even more so, to be able to \[unintelligible 00:36:59.01\] and comfort yourself. Like, how often when you feel sick though you want somebody else to care for you? ...because there's something tender in that. There'... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. But so it then really acts as this sort of analgesic. The pain reducer. And so what if we were able to reconceptualize or sort of rethink how we view touch in our lives? ...and really make it more that binary, like it's good or it's bad, or it's right or it's wrong. In what ways does it ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It brings up... When I was in the military -- when you're in the military, the first thing they do for you is they assign you a buddy. It's traumatic. I was young, 18, going into the military, so a very young mind; not a lot of lived life experience... Just a lot of things that I was just defi... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Wow. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, like "Where's your buddy?" is the common question. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Wow...! |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If you're somewhere without a buddy... Like, you go to the bathroom -- they might not be in the same stall with you, but they go to the restroom with you. They call it the latrine in the military, but whatever... It's not a bathroom. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** I can't believe I didn't mention this earlier with everything we've talked about, but what that buddy does, what this sense of closeness does is help boost oxytocin, that stress-reducing hormone. It protects you against the effects of stress. A hug from a friend isn't only comforting, it produ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... Well, there's certainly conflicting sciences in all scenarios, I would say... And maybe for a time being, this one in particular, there is an extreme reaction, but I do believe that there is a necessity for those who have this kind of information around serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin, espe... |
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