Body perception and social touch preferences in times of grief
By Meg Sosnowski, PhD
While grief is clearly rooted in neural and psychological systems, bereavement is also associated with physical experiences. Enmalm and Boehme delve directly into the physical experience of grief in their recent paper (2024), by surveying people who had recently (<2 years ago) lost a loved one about their physical experiences of grief. Most bereaved participants had a diminished sense of bodily feeling and bodily needs (e.g., hunger, thirst), as well as a feeling less present in their body. The majority of bereaved participants experienced physical sensations of grief in their chest (90.7%), while also experiencing grief in the stomach, head, and neck/throat. Notably, most of these are the same regions in which the consoling effect of a hug was felt by participants — which I interpret to suggest that typical consolation behavior may be intended to alleviate unpleasant feelings in the very areas most associated with grief sensations.
As a primatologist, I immediately connected these findings with social touch and consolation in non-humans. Although many researchers are wary of attaching human emotion to animals (a debate beyond the scope of the current discussion), many animals behave after the death of an attachment figure in ways that resemble grief in humans. In another recent paper (2023), Arlet and colleagues describe the reactions of macaque mothers to the loss of their infants, describing both individual variation and sample-wide trends. Notably, females suffering infant loss withdrew, and specifically were less involved in social grooming and hugging with other macaques. This may seem in contrast to Enmalm and Boehme’s findings, until we consider that many bereaved macaque mothers also initiated aggression more frequently — thus perhaps chasing away consoling conspecifics. This begs the question if macaque females who remain relatively socially engaged experience grief-related symptoms alleviated through accepting social touch, as compared to those who self-isolate to the extreme.
A missing piece of this puzzle is the physical cause of sensations and effect of consoling touch in these areas, as the Enmalm & Boehme paper was entirely survey-based. How is the localization of the grief-sensation in the chest related to data that the risk of cardiovascular events increases during bereavement? And is the effect of localized touch measurable using the biomarkers of stress and sociality associated with grief? Such questions bring to mind the wide-ranging field of embodied cognition — the idea that our experiences of our own bodies play a significant role in how we think, make decisions, and respond to events around us. Clearly, grief changes our bodily experience, and the integration of multiple approaches in tackling the embodied cognition of grief will require a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort.
Meg Sosnowski, PhD, is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Psychology and the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis, studying social attachment and cognition in coppery titi monkeys.
