Essay On Accidental Interpersonal Touch

This paper examines the effects of accidental interpersonal touch on customers during their shopping time and the difference between male and female reaction to it. Touch is in our everyday social interactions from birth through to adulthood and old age.The body surface is not only a receptive organ but also a very powerful interpersonal communication system. In fact, it has even been claimed that social touch plays one, in not ‘the’, most important role in the early psychological development of humans. Despite these considerations, the more perceptual aspects of touch have been much more frequently investigated by researchers. Touch is just as effective as vision in conveying emotional messages. In particular, anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, …show more content…
This study is observational, because the role of the investigator is merely to observe what happens, noting who is exposed or unexposed and who was and was not affected by the manipulations of the experiment. A major problem with observational studies is that the observed groups may differ in many other characteristics, in addition to the one under study. People may differ in social behavior due to lifestyle characteristics such as past experiences, personality types, tragedies they’ve been through and etc. All of these aspects could play a role in a person’s response to interpersonal touch. Take for example, someone who may have been beaten or abused as a child may be isolated, socially awkward, and suffer with social anxiety due to what they’ve been through. Because of these confounding and often unmeasurable factors, the role of a specific exposure under investigation is more difficult to establish than in experimental studies. The confounding variable within this study is interpersonal touch, simply because it was the variable that was used to manipulate and cause reaction from the consumers. No differential effects were detected with future research that may prove useful in better understanding this