They discovered that four specific gestures predicted when a person was less trustworthy: leaning away from someone; crossing arms in a blocking fashion; touching, rubbing or grasping hands together; and touching oneself on the face, abdomen or elsewhere.
Add to the Rooftop Rub Club stand-up comic Moshe Kasher, who wrote in his autobiography Kasher in the Rye that Jim Carroll's cult 1978 book spelled out that touching oneself didn't simply mean putting "your hand down your pants while watching TV, à la Al Bundy".
Thus, with respect to self-estrangement, one can be "out of touch" with oneself in several quite different ways.
In the age of the ever ubiquitous World Wide Web it is hard to shock people, but when a 26-year-old guy in a small town starts buying stuff worth a couple of lakhs without touching the products or without asking the salesman 101 questions, it is time to ask oneself what Marvin Gaye, the singer, asked: "What's going on?".
Pointing to oneself also implies honesty, not generally with a single finger, but with the full hand, usually located near or touching the chest.
In a univariate analysis, significant positive associations were found with having touched the corpse of someone who died from Durba syndrome, having had Durba syndrome oneself, and having received injections in the past year (Table 3).
To touch strangers' feet is to show deference they have not earned, Dr. Niraula said, and to label oneself as low-class, or at least lower than the person whose feet are being handled.
The idea of the silent witnesses touched him in some deep, primal way: "there is in the tale of Catherine Genovese a revelation about the human condition so appalling to contemplate that only good can come from forcing oneself to confront the truth".
Rather than going on about it at length (and I do think that "The Social Network" and "Catfish" touch fascinatingly on the issue), here's Paul Brunick, writing at IndieWire, about a strange manifestation of the new-media world and the way it taps into the drive to reflect oneself in a chosen mask.
Watching all these heavyweights gathered to play their hearts out for this cause, beneath a slideshow of the faces of beaming African children all personally touched by the work of Drop In The Bucket, one can't help but feel momentarily part of something much bigger than oneself.
A note on embodying flow: When one allows oneself to relax into the mystery that we are, there is an effacement -- an opening -- an allowance to being touched by a silent, dynamic force which has an intelligence that, again when I allow it, or soften into it, has an unerring potency and inherent knowing.
