Touch and Affect in Health Care Interaction

Principal investigator: Professor Johanna Ruusuvuori

Time 2021–2025

Touch and affect play an important role in health care interaction. Empathic touch and other affective embodied interaction have positive impact on human health and wellbeing. On the other hand, many treatments requiring contact may cause negative feelings both among professionals and patients. In this study, we analyze the role of touch and emotion in different types of healthcare encounters, with video-recordings of real-world healthcare interaction in three different cultural contexts. We analyze emotions and touch as a process produced jointly by the parties involved and examine their significance as an integral part of achieving the goals of the treatment situation. The study contributes to the development of theory concerning the intertwine of touch and affect and helps to develop health care services to better meet the challenges brought by the rapid increase of technologically mediated care.

Research team

Professor Johanna Ruusuvuori, PI of the project, will coordinate the research process and the analytic work of the research group. She has the main responsibility of the analyses on maternity and child health care clinics. She has published extensively on institutional interaction in various health care contexts (medical consultations, hearing clinics, maternity and child healthcare) as well as on emotion, empathy and facial expression in interaction. She brings to the project her expertise in the conversation analytic method and multimodal interaction analysis.

Dr. Aija Logren has the main responsibility for the comparative analysis of the Finnish and British data on medical consultations. Previously she has studied group interaction in health education and health counseling, using CA and discursive psychology as methods. She will bring to the project her expertise in multi-party interaction and clients' initiative in institutional settings. She will contribute to disseminating the results by developing educational materials and training resources for health care professionals and students.

Dr. Julia Katila, Doctor of Social Sciences, has the main responsibility for the collection and analysis of the Finnish dental data, and comparisons with the Chinese dental data. Julia's previous research has focused on the analysis of touch, multisensoriality and affect in interaction and her pioneering dissertation on tactile interaction between mothers and their children provides a framework for the analysis of touch and interaffectivity in the project.

Dr. Tuuli Turja is a postdoctoral researcher with a special interest in quantifying technology mediated interaction. Recently she has studied exoskeletons worn by nurses and found how wearable technology can affect both physical proximity and affective closeness, both essential in health care encounters. Previously Turja has studied how pain experiences in everyday accidents are associated with emotional stress all the way to trauma symptoms.

Juhana Mustakallio, Master of Social Psychology, is assisting with the research preparations and is doing analysis on interaction between doctors and patients focusing on touch and agency in the physical examination of the medical consultation.