(Newswire.net — March 27, 2020) — Unless we’re professional blackjack players and controlling the emotions is part of the game, we are among the few species known for touching their face without being aware of it. And this helps the spread of diseases such as the new coronavirus (Covid-19)..
Why are we doing this and how can we reduce this unconscious behavior?
The study shows that we all touch our faces with fascinating frequency, BBC reports. A 2015 observational study in Australia found that even medical students who should know better could not resist touching their faces.
Perhaps medical students should be more aware of the dangers than others, but they still reached for their faces no less than 23 times per hour, which included frequent contact with the mouth, nose, and eyes.
Official public health bodies and professionals, including the World Health Organization (WHO), say this “tapping festival” is very dangerous.
While most species touch their faces as a cleaning routine or as a way to ward off a variety of annoying pests, we and some primates do the same for various other reasons, experts say.
Sometimes it acts as a calming mechanism, according to Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Also, we use facial tapping unconsciously to flirt or “to act like the curtains on a stage, closing up one act of the social drama, ushering in the next”, says Keltner.
Other behavioral science experts have found that touching ourselves is a way to help control emotions and widen our attention span.
According to Martin Grunwald, a psychologist at the University of Leipzig, Germany, self-touching in this way is a “fundamental behavior of our species”.
“Self-touches are self-regulatory movements which are not usually designed to communicate and are frequently accomplished with little or no awareness,” he told BBC. “They play a key role in all cognitive and emotional processes. They occur in all people,” Greenwald said.
It seems that touching the face is deeply rooted in our subconsciousness but the problem with touching ourselves is that our eyes, nose, and mouth are the door to every kind of “nastiness” that can enter our body.
In 2012, a team of U.S. and Brazilian researchers found that a sample of randomly selected people touched surfaces in public space more than three times every hour.
They also reached for their mouth and nose “about 3.6 times an hour.” This is much less than the 23-hour rate for Australian medical students, perhaps because they were being observed while sitting in class, instead of outside where there was much more that could distract them.
For some healthcare professionals, this tendency to touch oneself is a stronger motivation for using face masks as a means of protection against the virus than just wearing them as a filter.
“Wearing a mask can reduce the propensity for people to touch their faces, which is a major source of infection without proper hand hygiene,” says Stephen Griffin a virologist at the University of Leeds, UK, BBC reports.