A child wants to be held and touched from the very first day of life. And a parent’s affectionate touch goes a long way, from boosting a newborn’s healthy development to shaping the child’s brain later on, a new study suggests. For many animals, touch is a strong communicator of emotions, a signal that bonds a parent to a child. To a newborn, a parent’s love may be as important as food, as the young monkeys in Harry Harlow’s famous experiments in the 1950s showed us when they clung to a soft dummy even if their milk came from somewhere else. Now, years after the famous monkey love experiments, researchers in Germany and Singapore used brain imaging to see whether receiving a lot of fond caresses affects the human brain in any measurable way. “We explored whether the touch parents direct at their children has effects beyond social bonding and shapes functional aspects of the developing brain,” researchers Jens Brauer, Annett Schirmer and their colleagues wrote in a study published in the August issue of Cerebral Cortex. The researchers gathered about 40 children around age 5 and their moms, and asked the pairs to play with Playmobil Farm toys for 10 minutes. The researchers watched and counted how many times mothers touched their children and how often the children touched their mothers. A couple of days later, the researchers scanned each child’s brain while he or she was at rest to see its activity patterns. They focused on the “social brain” ― that is, the sum of neuronal networks that makes us deal with a person differently than we do with, say, an apple. It is what’s at work when we behave socially, are interested in other people and try to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Researchers observed that brain activity across these networks was stronger for kids who received more tactile attention from their mothers. More ...
