User:Dutiful Peregrine/Skin hunger

Skinhunger is the lack of caring touch and the desire for skincontact.

This condition is also referred to as touch starvation or touch deprivation, it occurs when a person experiences little to no touch from other living things. These caring touches can go from hugs, embraches, shaking hands and pats on the back or head to kissing, intimacy, caresses and sex.

Primary necessity of life
As soon as someone is touched, oxytocin is released in the brain, this is also known as the happiness hormone. The skin is the biggest organ in the human body and it gives humans their identity and I-feeling. Touch is good for the overall well-being and is a primal mecessity of life. Research shows that babies need physical contact to develop correctly. The need for physical contact does not fade when getting older; children, youth, adults and elderly still require physical, skin-to-skin, contact. Physical contact is often becomes the only source of communication for people with dementia.

Experimentation on monkeys
Touch is of great importance to all primates. This is shown in an experiment from the 1950's done by an American psychologist Harry F. Harlow. He put rhesus monkeys, taken right after birth, in a cage each together with 2 fake mothers: one made out of stealwire and the other made out of soft tissue. In one of the experiments the steal mother was given a bottle of milk and the soft one not. The hypothesis was that nutrition would be the most important factor for attachment. The monkey chose however for the mother made out of soft tissue and only occasionally visited the steal mother just to drink a little, afterwards the rhesus monkey returned to the soft mother.