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Module 1.6d

Module 1.6d Sensation: Skin, Chemical,

and Body Senses and

Sensory Interaction

LEARNING TARGETS
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Not for redistribution.

1.6-12 Explain the four basic touch sensations, and explain how we sense touch.

1.6-13 Compare and contrast the biological, psychological, and social-cultural
influences that affect our experience of pain, and explain how placebos and
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
distraction help control pain.
1.6-14 Explain our senses of taste and smell.

1.6-15 Explain how we sense our body’s position and movement.

1.6-16 Explain how sensory interaction influences our perceptions, and explain the
concept of embodied cognition.

harks and dogs rely on their outstanding sense of smell, aided by their large smell-
related brain areas. By comparison, our human brain allocates more of its real estate
Sto seeing and hearing. But extraordinary happenings also occur as part of our skin
(touch and pain), chemical (taste and smell), and body (position and movement) senses.
Without these other senses, we humans would be seriously hampered, and our capacity for
enjoying the world would be greatly diminished.

Touch

1.6-12 What are the four basic touch sensations, and how do we sense touch?

1.6-12 What ar e the four basic touch sensations, and how do we sense touch?
Touch, our tactile sense, is vital. From infancy to adulthood, affectionate touches promote
our well-being ( Jakubiak & Feeney, 2017 ). Right from the start, touch aids our development.
Infant rats deprived of their mother’s grooming produce less growth hormone and have a
lower metabolic rate — a good way to keep alive until the mother returns, but a reaction that
stunts growth if prolonged. Infant monkeys that are allowed to see, hear, and smell — but
not touch — their mother become desperately unhappy ( Suomi et al., 1976 ). Premature
human babies gain weight faster and go home sooner if they are stimulated by hand
massage ( Field et al., 2006 ). When coping with disaster or grieving a death, we may find
comfort in a hug. As adults, we still yearn to touch — to kiss, to stroke, to snuggle.
Humorist Dave Barry (1985) was perhaps right to jest that your skin “keeps people
from seeing the inside of your body, which is repulsive, and it prevents your organs from © Jose Luis Pelaez/Blend Images/Corbis
falling onto the ground.” But skin does much more. Touching various spots on the skin with
a soft hair, a warm or cool wire, and the point of a pin reveals that some spots are especially
sensitive to pressure, others to warmth, others to cold, and still others to pain. Our “sense
of touch” is actually a mix of these four basic and distinct skin senses, and our other skin The precious sense of touch As
sensations are variations of pressure, warmth, cold, and pain. For example, stroking adjacent William James wrote in his Principles of
Psychology (1890) , “Touch is both the
pressure spots creates a tickle. Repeated gentle stroking of a pain spot creates an itching alpha and omega of affection.”

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