Deprivation of positive physical contact can result in depression and aggressive behavior, explains the founder of the Touch Research Institute
As people worldwide isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic, many got a taste of how going without human touch for extended periods of time can alter the body and mind. The impacts are harmful and wide-ranging — and American prisoners have long endured them.
Beyond the human connection that accompanies touch, a host of physiological reactions occur within the body and its central nervous system — processes that can ward off disease and that make us happier and less anxious.
In Episode 2 of Street Roots’ “Walled In” podcast, we examine how the lack of positive physical contact affects people who are incarcerated.
Quotes in this story were taken from the second episode of “Walled In,” a podcast co-produced by Street Roots and The Exiled Voice. In each episode, co-hosts Emily Green and Joshua Wright explore a different, lesser-known aspect of what it means to be incarcerated in America.
In the first half of the episode, Joshua Wright, a former prisoner, speaks with Latrice Williams about how the physical separation from her children and prison rules prohibiting touch affected her while she was incarcerated.
“We’re used to social distancing in prison,” Williams told Wright, “because you can’t really be next to nobody.” But, she explained, some straight-presenting women, including herself, engage in same-sex romantic relationships with other prisoners in order to cope.
Wright reflected on how, in the male prison population, touch became associated with violence.
“For me, it twisted my mind a lot. I just didn’t know how to touch people when I got out. I had to kind of relearn that. I didn’t know what safe touch was. I didn’t know how it’s supposed to feel anymore,” Wright said.
The following excerpt, edited for length, is from the second half of the episode, in which Street Roots interviews Tiffany Field, one of the world’s foremost experts on the science behind human touch and on the effects of going without it.
Field is the founder and director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami School of Medicine and has authored more than 400 journal papers and more than 20 books, primarily focused on different aspects of touch.
Emily Green: I was hoping you could briefly describe what exactly happens to a person, physiologically, when they are touched.
Tiffany Field: When you’re touched, you’re basically experiencing stimulation of your pressure receptors under your skin. So if anyone moves your skin or if you move your skin yourself, your pressure receptors are stimulated. And what happens then, is the messages from the pressure receptors are taken to the brain, to what’s called the vagus nerve, which has more nerve endings and longer pathways to various parts of body. So for example, there’s a pathway to the heart, and it slows down heart rate. When the message gets to the vagus, it slows down the nervous system. So heart rate is reduced, blood pressure is reduced, brainwaves change in the direction of more relaxation, there is an increase in theta waves, which are associated with relaxation. And in turn, what happens is that the basic stress hormones, like cortisol, are reduced. And when you reduce cortisol, you save immune cells. Namely, you save natural killer cells — natural killer cells are the frontline of the immune system, and they knocked down cancer cells, viral cells and bacterial cells. Additionally, oxytocin, which is the love hormone, is increased. And the neurotransmitter serotonin is increased. It is the body’s natural, antidepressant and anti-pain neurotransmitter. So there are all these bioelectrical, biochemical events that happen after you move the skin. And it seems so simple, but underneath the skin, there’s a lot of complex results or effects.
Green: What happens then, in the body and in the mind, when a person such as a person in prison, is completely deprived of human touch for a very long period of time, such as somebody who’s in solitary confinement?
Field: We haven’t directly studied prisoners, but we can basically extrapolate from the information we have on many other conditions, that anyone who isn’t touched for a prolonged period of time is going to be depressed, because as I said, their serotonin levels won’t be that high, and they will have a lot of stress because their cortisol levels will be elevated. And probably they’ll experience some illness because the immune system is not being activated by that kind of stimulation.
And we know from our studies that they will also become aggressive. We know that because we studied preschool-aged kids and adolescents in Paris and Miami, and we looked at how much touch stimulation they were getting, mostly in the form of physical contact from their parents or their friends, and we found that the kids in Miami had significantly less touching, and they were significantly more physically and verbally aggressive. Those are some of the effects that we would expect from touch deprivation.
There’s a lot of prisons where people are not allowed to touch because there’s mandates against it. But there’s also aversion to touch. And in fact, they have coined a term called “prisonization,” which is an aversion to touch.
If they don’t have rules not to touch, they don’t tend to touch each other anyway, because of concerns about things like homosexuality, about inciting some kind of aggression from the other person. I’ve seen some studies where, for example, they spend more time working out to build muscle mass so that they won’t be touched or physically aggressed by other prisoners. So I think they have a very difficult situation there from being deprived but also not wanting to be involved in any kind of touch relationship.
Green: What you’re describing with touch aversion is very similar to what our host was talking about in the first half of the episode. He said that he began to associate touch with violence, and it actually turned into something that he feared. How difficult is it for somebody to overcome that kind of touch aversion after they get out of that violent environment?
Field: I think there’s a huge adjustment because they haven’t been used to communicating — not just by a touch, but normal face-to-face interaction. And so they tend to isolate themselves from their old friends, from even their family members, and I think their depression continues. I know several prisoners who, when they’ve been released from prison, they’ve been very sick. And they have remained in bed. And it’s hard to imagine, because you would think that once they’re released from an isolating experience, that they would not any longer want to be isolated.
Green: As the country is recovering from this pandemic, so many people living alone have — similar to prisoners — gone through long periods of time where they haven’t experienced a lot of touch. Do you think that there are things that maybe some of our listeners might be able to recognize in themselves, that they may have been experiencing if that was the case for them?
Field: Yes, definitely. And in fact we did a survey during the COVID lockdown in March and April. We found that the young people living alone were significantly more deprived than the old people living alone. We compared groups of young people, 20 to 40 years of age, versus people 60 to 80 years of age. And the young people living alone were significantly more touch deprived, they were more depressed, they were more anxious, they had more sleep problems, they had PTSD symptoms, they were bored, they felt isolated and lonely — they were definitely the most deprived group. And the only thing that seemed to compensate for that was exercise.
We were a little surprised because we sort of expected the older people to be experiencing these emotional problems more than the young people. But when we thought about it and tried to interpret it, we figured that old people living alone were more used to that, so COVID was not such a shock to them as it was the young people living alone who are more accustomed to being with their friends.
We were surprised that even people who were living with other people were feeling touch deprived. We thought that people living with people would find more opportunity to be touching each other, to back rubs, to holding kids on their laps, etc. But we found that even though 60% said they were touched deprived, only 21% were living alone. So that means that 39% of people living together were feeling touch deprived.
And we asked two other questions about touch. One was, how much they were touching their partner, and the other was how much they were touching their kids. And we found that only 31% said they were touching their partner a lot, and only 22% said they were touching their kids a lot. So they were obviously doing a lot of other things, than touching.
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Green: What you said about exercise is interesting. I know a lot of folks who are incarcerated have pretty regular exercise routines. Does exercising do something physiologically that’s similar to touch?
Field: Yes. If you think about your pressure receptors are all over your body. So if you simply walk across the floor, and we told this to a lot of old people who are living alone, just get up and walk around your living room, you’ll be stimulating pressure receptors in your feet. If you sit and cross your legs and swing your legs, you’re stimulating pressure receptors in your legs. If you brush yourself in the shower, you’re stimulating pressure receptors all over your body. And think about how much we are washing our hands, that is stimulating pressure receptors in our hands. So exercise is — I wouldn’t say substitute — but it does buffer the effects of touch deprivation. We’ve actually published data comparing yoga with massage therapy and found very similar effects. When you think about it, in yoga, you’re moving limbs against each other and against the floor. So you’re also stimulating pressure receptors in exercises like yoga.
Green: If one of our goals in locking people up is rehabilitation, do you think that there’s a science-backed argument for offering touch therapy in prisons?
Field: Yes, I definitely think that every prisoner should have a massage. And, certainly, at the very least, they should be educated on the positive effects of self-massage. When you think about it, all parts of your body are accessible to your own hands. When we do massage therapy studies, we always teach them how to self-massage, just in case they don’t have a partner to do it or they can’t afford to go to a massage therapist. So, for example, we found out that migraine headaches could be reduced by massaging the nape of the neck. And so we showed people how to just simply take their fingertips and apply pressure and little circles in the nape of their neck. And they’ll get rid of migraine headaches that way. On and on: You can reach your lower back to massage lower back pain. And so yeah, we would be good to have education programs in prison about how you can massage yourself if there’s no one else there to do it for you.
“Walled In” co-host Joshua Wright contributed to this report.
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