Touch and Blindness

Touch and Blindness PDF Author: Morton A. Heller
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135619301
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Research on touch and blindness has undergone rapid transformation in recent years, with dramatic developments in technology designed to provide assistance to those who are blind, and advancements in robotics that demand haptic interfaces. Touch and Blindness approaches the study of the topic from the perspectives of psychological methodology and the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art techniques in neuroscience. This book, edited by well-known leaders in the field, is derived from the discussions presented by speakers at a conference held in 2002, and presents current research in the field. The book is arranged in a logical, disciplinary fashion, first discussing touch and blindness from a psychological perspective, followed by an examination from the perspective of neuroscience. Some specific topics include: *processing spatial information from touch and movement; *form, projection, and pictures for the blind; *neural substrate and visual and tactile object representations; and *the role of visual cortex in tactile processing. Touch and Blindness is ideal for researchers in psychology and neuroscience, medicine, and special education.

The Psychology of Touch

The Psychology of Touch PDF Author: Morton A. Heller
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317760093
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Designed to make research on touch understandable to those not specifically involved in tactile research, this book provides broad coverage of the field. It includes material on sensory physiology and psychophysics, thermal sensibility, pain, pattern participation, sensory aids, and tactile perception in blind people. While the volume is important for researchers in the area of touch, it should also prove valuable to a broad audience of experimental and educational psychologists, and health professionals. The book should also be of interest to scientists in perception, cognition, and cognitive science, and can be used as a supplementary reader for courses in sensation and perception.

Out of Touch

Out of Touch PDF Author: Michelle Drouin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046679
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A behavioral scientist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex—although of course sex is an important part of intimacy. But how important? Drouin reports on surveys that millennials (perhaps distracted by constant Tinder-swiping) have less sex than previous generations. She discusses pandemic puppies, professional cuddlers, the importance of touch, “desire discrepancy” in marriage, and the value of friendships. Online dating, she suggests, might give users too many options; and the internet facilitates “infidelity-related behaviors.” Some technological advances will help us develop and maintain intimate relationships—our phones, for example, can be bridges to emotional support. Some, on the other hand, might leave us out of touch. Drouin explores both of these possibilities.

Touch, second edition

Touch, second edition PDF Author: Tiffany Field
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026252659X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Why we need a daily dose of touch: an investigation of the effects of touch on our physical and mental well-being. Although the therapeutic benefits of touch have become increasingly clear, American society, claims Tiffany Field, is dangerously touch-deprived. Many schools have “no touch” policies; the isolating effects of Internet-driven work and life can leave us hungry for tactile experience. In this book Field explains why we may need a daily dose of touch. The first sensory input in life comes from the sense of touch while a baby is still in the womb, and touch continues to be the primary means of learning about the world throughout infancy and well into childhood. Touch is critical, too, for adults' physical and mental health. Field describes studies showing that touch therapy can benefit everyone, from premature infants to children with asthma to patients with conditions that range from cancer to eating disorders. This second edition of Touch, revised and updated with the latest research, reports on new studies that show the role of touch in early development, in communication (including the reading of others' emotions), in personal relationships, and even in sports. It describes the physiological and biological effects of touch, including areas of the brain affected by touch, and the effects of massage therapy on prematurity, attentiveness, depression, pain, and immune functions. Touch has been shown to have positive effects on growth, brain waves, breathing, and heart rate, and to decrease stress and anxiety. As Field makes clear, we enforce our society's touch taboo at our peril.

Touch

Touch PDF Author: David J. Linden
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143128442
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Compass of Pleasure" examines how our sense of touch is interconnected with our emotions Dual-function receptors in our skin make mint feel cool and chili peppers hot.

The Psychology of Touch

The Psychology of Touch PDF Author: Morton A. Heller
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317760107
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Designed to make research on touch understandable to those not specifically involved in tactile research, this book provides broad coverage of the field. It includes material on sensory physiology and psychophysics, thermal sensibility, pain, pattern participation, sensory aids, and tactile perception in blind people. While the volume is important for researchers in the area of touch, it should also prove valuable to a broad audience of experimental and educational psychologists, and health professionals. The book should also be of interest to scientists in perception, cognition, and cognitive science, and can be used as a supplementary reader for courses in sensation and perception.

Touching for Knowing

Touching for Knowing PDF Author: Yvette Hatwell
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027251862
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The dominance of vision is so strong in sighted people that touch is sometimes considered as a minor perceptual modality. However, touch is a powerful tool which contributes significantly to our knowledge of space and objects. Its intensive use by blind persons allows them to reach the same levels of knowledge and cognition as their sighted peers.In this book, specialized researchers present the recent state of knowledge about the cognitive functioning of touch. After an analysis of the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of touch, exploratory manual behaviors, intramodal haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) abilities and cross-modal visual-tactual coordination are examined in infants, children and adults, and in non-human primates. These studies concern both sighted and blind persons in order to know whether early visual deprivation modifies the modes of processing space and objects. The last section is devoted to the technical devices favoring the school and social integration of the young blind: Braille reading, use of raised maps and drawings, “sensory substitution” displays, and new technologies of communication adapted for the blind. (Series B)

The Senses of Touch

The Senses of Touch PDF Author: Mark Paterson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000190153
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book 'feels' its way towards writing and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, the book examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our 'senses' of touch.

The Power Paradox

The Power Paradox PDF Author: Dacher Keltner
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698195590
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
A revolutionary and timely reconsideration of everything we know about power. Celebrated UC Berkeley psychologist Dr. Dacher Keltner argues that compassion and selflessness enable us to have the most influence over others and the result is power as a force for good in the world. Power is ubiquitous—but totally misunderstood. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, Dr. Dacher Keltner presents the very idea of power in a whole new light, demonstrating not just how it is a force for good in the world, but how—via compassion and selflessness—it is attainable for each and every one of us. It is taken for granted that power corrupts. This is reinforced culturally by everything from Machiavelli to contemporary politics. But how do we get power? And how does it change our behavior? So often, in spite of our best intentions, we lose our hard-won power. Enduring power comes from empathy and giving. Above all, power is given to us by other people. This is what we all too often forget, and it is the crux of the power paradox: by misunderstanding the behaviors that helped us to gain power in the first place we set ourselves up to fall from power. We abuse and lose our power, at work, in our family life, with our friends, because we've never understood it correctly—until now. Power isn't the capacity to act in cruel and uncaring ways; it is the ability to do good for others, expressed in daily life, and in and of itself a good thing. Dr. Keltner lays out exactly—in twenty original "Power Principles"—how to retain power; why power can be a demonstrably good thing; when we are likely to abuse power; and the terrible consequences of letting those around us languish in powerlessness.

The Book of Touch

The Book of Touch PDF Author: Constance Classen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000323595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book puts a finger on the nerve of culture by delving into the social life of touch, our most elusive yet most vital sense. From the tortures of the Inquisition to the corporeal comforts of modernity, and from the tactile therapies of Asian medicine to the virtual tactility of cyberspace, The Book of Touch offers excursions into a sensory territory both foreign and familiar. How are masculine and feminine identities shaped by touch? What are the tactile experiences of the blind, or the autistic? How is touch developed differently across cultures? What are the boundaries of pain and pleasure? Is there a politics of touch? Bringing together classic writings and new work, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the body, the senses and the experiential world.