Affective Touch And Preschool Learning

Executive Summary

• The affective touch is an efficient stimulus to reduce the stress and improve the sensitivity to social interactions such as those inherent to learning at school.
• In infancy the affective touch benefits the learning of new faces and words.
• The affective touch can be used to promote learning by parents and relatives but under strict regulations, also by early educators
• When possible, the affective touch can complement the affective message delivered by the voice, gaze and facial expressions at home and school.

Introduction

Affective touch and preschool learning

Learning in social contexts requires training social cognition. Preschoolers are called to advance in behavioral and emotional autoregulation, attention control, metacognition about own emotions, and other abilities which provide a challenging but low stressful environment to learn. One of the practice that parents, relatives and under certain circumstances, early childhood educators may use to benefit the emotional and educational environments is the affective touch. Recent studies have shown that the affective touch modulates the response of the nervous system controlling emotions, promoting bonding and somehow protecting mental health^1-4.

Discriminative and affective touch

Touch is a powerful communicative signal, and humans can use it to transmit emotions and define social bonds5-6. There are different types of touch: a) discriminative touch, which allow distinguishing sensations such as shapes, textures, heat or pain, and is maximal at the hair-free skin and mediated by myelinated nerves which transmit rapidly the information to the brain; and b) social-affective touch^2,7, which is activated by caresses and transmitted by slow fibers to the brain, known as “C-tactile afferents” ^8-10. The C-tactile afferents are placed in hairy skin areas of the body and respond preferentially to the gentle and slow tactile stimulation (ranging between 1 to 10 cm /s) within skin-like temperatures¹¹, both, characteristics of caressing. Indeed, the C-tactile afferents reduce their activity when the tactile stimulation become strong and fast⁸. In the brain, the information transmitted by the C-tactile afferents activates the brain circuits related to bonding and reward reported as positive affections by adults^8,12. 

Affective touch and cognition

Affective touch influences the way we perceive external stimuli and evokes different emotions¹³. Being touched by other person may calm or generate enormous distress and modify our cognitive processing. For instance, in adults, a gentle touch from another person influences the way we classify social expressions. Indeed, a gentle touch presented simultaneously to visual stimulation makes the persons perceiving the smiling faces as more attractive and friendly and the angry faces less attractive and friendly, relative to the perception when the touch is delivered by a machine¹⁴.

During infancy and early childhood, affective touch associates with reduction of the infant response to stress during exposure to still-face situation of their mothers^{3, 15}, helps children to maintain eye-contact and smiling even with strangers adults¹⁶, reinforce social bonding¹⁷, and facilitating learning of contingent social information¹⁸.

Moreover, affective touch has been associated with better health in young infants. For instance, the practice of make skin-to-skin of neonates and mother, benefits mother-infant attachment¹⁹ but also improves the stability of the heart rate, respiratory rate and oxygen saturation of the preterm neonates²⁰. Moreover, infants who has received skin-to-skin at neonatal age exhibit better cognitive control and better responses to stress than controls, who did not receive the intervention, at 10 years of age latter, suggesting that affective touch has long-term positive effects in cognitive development³. In contrast, deprivation of tactile stimulation at early age associates with impairments in the intellectual, physical, behavioral and social-emotional development of children²¹. A study, even in small samples, reported that in cultures that allows touching the preschoolers, the children exhibited less anger and aggressive behaviors than in cultures that forbids this practice²².

Affective touch and learning

Even scarce, some studies have reported that affective touch benefits learning in infancy. An important part of the positive effects of affective touch on learning would be related to a better control of stress. Indeed, affective touch associates with a decrease in heart rate and an increase in the activity at the insular cortex, which are classic responses observed when stress reduces.

Data from 4 to 5-month-olds show that affective touch facilitates the learning and distinction of new faces, even when the faces have averted gaze avoiding making visual contact with the infant^23. Infants also watch longer to the faces that have been presented concomitant with affective touch²⁴.

Moreover, when 4-month-olds are exposed to continuous speech streams containing the words of the body parts embedded on it, the infants better learn the words when the experimenters touch the corresponding body part with a caress-like touch. These data suggest that the multi-sensorial caregiver-infant interaction facilitates the learning of words for body parts very early on²⁵. This study is supported by a second one done in 5-month-olds, showing that affective touch facilitates the recognition of the image that correspond to the body part where they are receiving the caresses²⁶.

Contrary to discriminative touch, the affective touch seems to have an important role promoting the social functioning from early infancy, by promoting the engaging of interpersonal interactions, probably by providing a low stressful environment enriched by positive emotions. Indeed, in adults, affective touch associates with higher scores recognizing the emotion of a spoken exemplar of the expression “Ah” when it is uttered with anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise emotion²⁷.

The affective touch would also favor self-regulation. Self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, and is crucial to confront learning under social conditions which involve appropriate ways to manage challenges, controlling anxiety, frustrations and boredom, accepting sharing the attention of the caregivers, between others uncertain factors that the learning at the classroom provides.

The brain activity behind the affective touch

C-tactile fibers connect with brain networks involved in social processing²⁸.

In adults, the brain regions involved in processing affective touch include networks for processing tactile sense but also brain networks involved in emotion and social cognition such as insula²⁹. In human adults, the insula integrates information from all sensorial modalities, emotional brain such as limbic cortical regions and brain regions related to reward. Notably, similar networks are already functional in 2-month-old infants³⁰, even they are rapidly developing, refining connections with other areas and maturing during the first years of the life.

Another important point is that affective touch would promote the activity of the parasympathetic system, which return the biological activities to a rest equilibrium contributing to lead with challenging and potentially stressful situations^{31, 32}.

The oxytocin and the affective touch

The precise relationship between affective touch and neurochemical substance in the brain is not clear. However, several studies in humans and other mammals indicate that Oxytocin, commonly known as the “love hormone”, would serve as a neurochemical modulator of the effect of affective touch on social bonding and attachment^{33, 34}. Despite of most studies evaluating the relationship between oxytocin and affective touch have been done in non-human animals, mainly because the technical difficulties to measure its levels in the blood and saliva, recent studies have reported important data from humans, which are in line with the ones observed in non-human studies, make this type of studies very promising in the mental health domain.

Between others, it has been reported that oxytocin has anxiolytic effects³⁵ and reduces the stress, measured as a reduction in the cortisol blood levels in response to stressful stimulation³⁶. In marmosets, oxytocin is reduced during social isolation and associated with avoidance behaviors³⁷.

An interesting result found in human adults show that salivary oxytocin varies during the learning of a new anticipation task. Initially, the level of oxytocin increases while the trust of the response increase, but in the subsequent sessions oxytocin levels decreased while the trust still increases, and the adults are already familiar with the task³⁸. This study suggests that at least in adults, oxytocin would play an important role in the initial steps of learning, when the novelty of the task is high. A quite similar modulation in salivary oxytocin is observed in mothers interacting with own and strange children. When mothers familiarize to interact with previously unknown children they exhibit higher levels of salivary oxytocin than when they interact with their own children³⁹, supporting the idea that oxytocin increases as a mechanism to lead with inherent stress associated with challenging novel situations, such as learning in social environments. Together, despite the evidence from humans is scarce, affective touch seems to be tightly linked with the regulation in oxytocin levels.

How educators may exploit affective touch and positive affects in general

Affective touch from early teachers should be a powerful tool to promote positive emotional conditions associated with learning at the classroom.

However, in many cultures, the affective touch by strangers is forbidden to prevent unappropriated child-teacher interactions. This restriction to be touched has been recognized as deleterious by expert in child development and some discussion about safely may be updated at the local level⁴⁰.

However, there are others ways by which early educators may to exploit this tool to improve learning, when necessary.

First, when allowed by parents, tutors and educational institutions, educators may be given the freedom to touch preschoolers in public and surveilled places.

Second, educators may promote affective touch from parents and relatives at home to reinforce school readiness as well as specific contents of preschool learning.

Third, if parents and institutions agree, educators may promote affective touch between peers at the classroom when stressful conditions require.

Fourth, since positive affections are transmitted also by regards, voice, facial expressions and face-to-face interactions, educators may exploit those practices and systematize the use infant-directed speech, smiley faces and direct gaze when teaching and learning are taking place.

Fifth, affective touch can also be a powerful tool to lead with the stressful challenges that early educators may have. Indeed, gentle touch in massage format is a common practice available to workers in many enterprises.

Sixth, in experimental social conditions, the human gentle touch can be partially mimicked by using a soft brush or machines which avoid direct skin-to-skin contact, and may contribute to provide a not natural but useful tool for promoting child development at early age.

References

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