Seth Roberts asks:
The photo shows the full faces of 22 men; 7 of them are touching
their mouths. I have noticed something similar at many faculty
meetings. I started to notice this after I read about its observation
in a study designed to measure something else.I’ve known about this for many years but have never read an
explanation. Do we enjoy touching our mouths – or is the absence of
touch for a long time unpleasant? If so, why?
Here is one poker player’s answer.
I like to smell my hand.
Better question, why does it feel better to rub a wound. I got hit in the face with a rock recently and once I rubbed the spot it felt better. Is that a way of making me check my wounds for seriousness. Weird.
Yawn. Giggle. Hey, don’t ask me questions, I’m Mister Thoughtful. So … as long as they don’t touch themselves in other places …
I’ve often considered this action as a kind of physical demonstration or representation of a metaphorical systemic mapping of an action ‘workflow’ in the mind of the person constructing the action.
In other words, it’s as if you’ve got some words that are now assembled, parsed, ready to be said, and you’re pointing at the bit that is about to say them. At other times, you might be pointing at your head or your chest or your tummy, or even your genitals, depending upon where along the process of forming the surface sentence the idea you’re communicating really is.
Other times you’ll be pointing away from you into various spaces left, right, in front, behind, near, far, high, low, which may represent metaphorical spatial mapping of time and other relationships in your proposed utterance.
VC — rubbing a wound stimulates other nerve endings besides the ones communicating pain. The brain pays more attention to new signals than to old ones, so the older pain signals may recede into the background. This is also why slapping near a mosquito bite helps relieve the itch without scratching.
Back when I was in college I acted in a show where a leading role in the play was a woman masquerading as a woman. An actor friend of mine gave this advice to the actress playing the part: One major difference between how women and men move their bodies is the amount that they touch their face. He argued that man touch their faces far more frequently than women — tugging at facial hair, covering their mouth, scratching their cheeks, etc. Through the years I’ve found that observation to be extremely accurate.
But of the men noticeably distracted by the attractive woman, only one is touching his mouth.
Does it happen most often in social situations? I suspect that, because the mouth is very expressive, the touching may be a form of masking a smirk or other signal that could offend.
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