Hand Feeling Research Articles

Rubber Hands Feel the Touch of Light

Two experiments involving a total of 220 subjects are reported. The experiments document that "stroking" a false hand with the bright beam of light from a laser pointer can produce tactile and thermal sensations when the hand can be seen as one's own. Overall, 66% of subjects reported somatic sensations from the light. Felt hand location was recalibrated toward the location of the false hand for those subjects who felt the light. Moreover, the proprioceptive recalibration from the laser experience was comparable to that produced by actual coordinated brushing of the false hand and of the unseen real hand after 2 min of stimulation. The illusion may be experienced on one's real hand as well. The results are discussed in terms of multisensory integration.

57: Patient survey of continuous interscalene analgesia at home after shoulder surgery

57: Patient survey of continuous interscalene analgesia at home after shoulder surgery

Having a body versus moving your body: How agency structures body-ownership

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness are local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body.

Optimization Aspects on the Hand of the Fabrics

Fabric hand is an essential property of textile fabrics. It affects the sensorial perception of humans when they touch a fabric. The feeling of hand depends on many factors; mainly on the low stress mechanical behavior of the fabric as well as on the subjective aspects of the person assessing the fabric such as sensitivity, culture, etc. The hand of the fabrics can be approached either by subjective estimations or by objective measurements. Both evaluation methods provide the necessary information for the calculation of the total hand value (THV) of the fabric. The THV is a function of multiple variables: the primary hand values. The complex expression of the THV introduces difficulties in predicting the conditions for the maximization of its final value. The present work provides a mathematical tool for a parametric study and definition of the quantities, which have to change, in order to maximize the THV of the fabric.

Impaired self-perception of the hand in complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)

To investigate neglect, extinction, and body-perception in patients suffering from complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). So-called ‘neglect-like’ symptoms have been reported in CRPS, however no studies have yet analyzed this phenomenon which might substantiate the theory of the central nervous system involvement in the pathophysiology of CRPS. A total of 114 patients with CRPS of the upper limb underwent bedside neurological examination. ‘Neglect-like’ symptoms were determined by asking all patients what kind of feeling they had toward the affected hand (feeling of foreignness). Hemispatial neglect was tested with the line bisection task in 29 patients and sensory extinction to simultaneous stimulation in 40 patients. The ability to identify fingers after tactile stimulation was tested in 73 patients. Independently of the affected side and disease duration, 54.4% of the patients reported that their hand felt ‘foreign’ or ‘strange’. The ability to identify fingers was impaired in 48% on the affected hand and in 6.5% on the unaffected hand ( X 2=33.52, d f=1, p<0.0001). These findings were related to pain intensity, illness duration and the extent of sensory deficits. No typical abnormalities indicating neglect were found in the line bisection test. Sensory extinction was normal in all patients. A large proportion of CRPS patients have disturbances of the self-perception of the hand, indicating an alteration of higher central nervous system processing. There are no indicators that classic neglect or extinction contribute to these findings. Physical therapy of such patients should take this observation into consideration.

Life, Death, and Humor: Approaches to Storytelling in Native America

Edith Turner has been studying healing as a sensitive, spiritually attuned participant-observer for a long time. Despite her academic background, experiential learning and knowing are important parts of Turner’s approach to research. Her efforts to understand healing have taken her on journeys to Africa, Mexico, Ireland, and more recently, Alaska’s North Slope. In these contexts, she has experienced healing offered by others, and learned to heal in various traditional ways herself. In her book, The Hands Feel It (1996), Turner focuses on the role that touch and spirit presence have in healing in a North Slope Iñupiat community. However, her book makes clear that narrative and storytelling are important parts of the healing process, as well. In this paper, Turner elaborates on some aspects of the connection between narrative and healing based on her North Slope experience.

Total handle evaluation from selected mechanical properties of knitted fabrics using neural network

This paper concentrated on the objective evaluation of total hand value in knitted fabrics using the theory of neural networks and the comparison of two methods. For the objective evaluation of overall hand feeling in knitted fabric, 47 kinds of weft‐knitted and warp‐knitted fabrics were manufactured. The optimum construction of neural networks was investigated through the change of layer and neuron number. For the comparison of the two methods, a subjective test was carried out. Two techniques, KES‐FB system and neural network applied simulator, were compared using nine randomly selected knitted fabrics. These fabrics were used to show that the neural network adapted simulation method was in good agreement with subjective test results.

Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860

Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and Formation of American Literature, 1730-1860. By Paul Giles. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. 262. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95.) At precisely time when theories of romantic irony were being developed, writes Paul Giles, was coming to appear to Europe as a kind of cracked or crazy mirror, wherein Old World witnessed strangely distorted representations of itself (149). The author is playing off transatlantic wanderings and prose of Washington Irving as he commits these thoughts, but statement extends to overall theme of Transatlantic Insurrections: boundaries of literary geography need to be redrawn, and what is traditionally seen as a republican, or romantic, or consciousness can always stand to be reevaluated. America and Great Britain unsettled each other for a century at least, beginning well before Revolution, as prominent writers on both sides of Atlantic reveal. Alexander Pope is, in this sense, prototype; he embraces contraries instead of dividing moral simply into light and dark, good and evil. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson enjoyed Pope's writing; marginalized and misunderstood Massachusetts Loyalist Mather Byles perhaps could not have pursued disjunction between Puritan cosmology and Enlightenment rationalism in his punning and poetry without Pope; in their attempts at an American epic poem, Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow could not resist Pope's verbal inversions and antagonistic literary style. Pope was uncredited progenitor, then, of a fractured and fractious world view, appreciated by Jefferson in his reading of Laurence Sterne, and subsequently, tantalizingly, twisted by many others. If this sounds like a language foreign to most historians of early republic, it is. But if Giles, like most literary critics, does not clarify history empirically, he possesses an original intellectual style of argot that provokes a reconsideration of any consensus historical profession might arrive at with respect to such variable terms as orthodoxy or reactionary or democracy. Historians who settle too easily on divisions between Federalist and Republican ideologies are ignoring iconoclasm and comic sensibility that flew beneath radar of pamphlets and newspapers. The very real, deeply-felt instability in early American political culture suggests that a detour in reading existing record may be in order. Giles dissects John Trumbull's subversive M'Fingal for its chaos and carnival. Yet Trumbull is one of Connecticut Wits, literary acolytes of sober High Federalism. Here is a perfect example of inheritors of Pope, who see what isn't there: in the rule of topsyturvys (57), all abide by a government that is anarchy, where neither loyalist nor patriot can find a firm place to stand. Behind politeness and gentility of Federalist diatribe lies a ferocious spirit of mockery. Though Giles does not exactly say so, inversions spirit of frenzied world created by Charles Brockden Brown fit neatly here. The morbid gothic of late 1790s that seems to come on so suddenly amid pedagogical calls for social order on one hand and Sternean fellow feeling on other, in fact has a rich heritage. Even Samuel Richardson, erstwhile father of pervasive, moralistic, sentimental novel, is in Giles's persuasive analysis inventor of a chameleonic universe where antithetical commingle. …

Surface Roughness and Fractal Dimension

Surface roughness is one of the main characteristics of fabric responsible for hand feeling. By using KES, the surface height variation (SHV) trace is obtained. For characterization of roughness the mean absolute deviation (MAD; denoted by Kawabata as SMD) is usually used. The main aim of this work is quantitative description of complexity of roughness based on the SHV. The procedure of surface complexity parameters evaluation from SHV traces is described. The core is inspection of power spectral density and variogram (or autocorrelation function) behavior and classification of SHV signal to some groups. For individual groups, fractal dimension and surface roughness characteristics are computed by suitable methods. Proposed procedure was checked on the simulated SHV profiles and on practical examples.

The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People

This is the account of one person's experience among the Inupiat, who live in a treeless land far north of the Arctic Circle. It records occurrences of healing, spirit manifestation, and premonition in her narrative in a year in the life of an Eskimo community.

Objective Evaluation of Fabric Hand

A simple extraction method effectively measures the changes in hand resulting from different fabric types, flame retardant (FR) finishes, and fabric wetness. The effects of FR finishes and wetness on the original fabric hand are inconsistent in terms of the direction of increase or decrease depending on the fabric and finish. When FR finished fabrics are wetted, hand forces increase for all fabrics tested. In investigating the re lationships between hand values and selected hand-related physical and surface prop erties, flexural rigidity, drape, and static friction are the major properties that influence hand force measured by the extraction method. This simple method appears to closely approximate the fabric tactile response the human hand feels when touching and grab bing. Hand values objectively measured by this method simultaneously reflect the phys ical and surface properties of the fabric that are important in determining overall hand.

The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence Among a Northern Alaskan People.

The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence Among a Northern Alaskan People.

The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among a Northern Alaskan People

The Hands Feel It: Healing and Spirit Presence among. Northern Alaskan People. Edith Turner. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. 282 pages. $38.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).

Evaluation of Hand Feeling Properties of Cotton Fabrics Hydrophilized Restrictively to Their Inner Parts.

The ami of this study is to evaluate hand feeling properties (the Fu-ai indecies) of sample fabrics, treated by the inner carboxymethylation, with the KES method, and to compare the results with those obtained for the starting fabric and the whole-carboxymethylated fabrics. It was recognized that, in addition to appreciable enhancement of their water absorbency, the inner-carboxymethylated fabrics showed Fu-ai indecies fairly colse to those of the starting fabric, so far as the extent of carboxymethylation was low.

The alien hand and related signs.

Alien limb sign includes failure to recognise ownership of one's limb when visual cues are removed, a feeling that one body part is foreign, personification of the affected body part, and autonomous activity which is perceived as outside voluntary control. Although the hand is most frequently affected, any limb or combination of limbs may fulfil the alien limb criteria. Alien hand sign should be reserved for cases in which the hand feels foreign together with observable involuntary motor activity. To characterise this phenomenon, seven patients with alien hand sign and other motor or behavioural manifestations are described. Aetiologies included multiple infarcts and cortobasal ganglionic degeneration (CBD). In this study, all patients had apraxia in response to verbal commands and problems with bimanual coordination. Most displayed non-goal directed involuntary motor activities, and two had self destructive motor behaviours. Grasp reflex occurred with alien hand due to either aetiology. Cortical reflex myoclonus was frequently seen in CBD patients. The phenomenological spectrum is reviewed, a diagnostic protocol proposed, and possible anatomical bases of alien hand discussed.

Temperature sensation: The “3-bowls experiment” revisited

The "3-bowls experiment", usually attributed to E. H. Weber*, will be remembered by many from their first lab course in human physiology. The left and right hands are immersed for several minutes in bowls containing water at 10 and 40°C, respectively. When both hands are then placed in a third bowl of water at 27 °C, the left hand feels distinctly warm and the right hand distinctly cool. Until now nobody has been able to reconcile this apparent unreliability of the sense of temperature with the observation that humans regularly make judgements of the temperatures of objects; for example, mothers seldom use a thermometer to check the temperature of a baby's milk, but rather hold the bottle against the skin on their arm or face. Hensel [3] showed that human subjects are well able to make reproducible statements of steady temperature sensation in response to constant temperatures. Does this contradict the three-bowls experiment? The most direct way to resolve the issue is a reinvestigation of the experiment, testing the entire temperature range rather than using only a single combination. Human subjects adapted their left and right hands at 43 and 20°C, respectively, by immersion in water of the corresponding temperature for 15 min. However, the temperature in the test basin into which the subjects then plunged their hands could be varied between 13 and 46 °C in ten steps. The sensation of warm or cold on each hand was then judged on a scale between 4 (very cold) and + 4 (very hot) after 2 s of immersion. Between tests, the hands were readapted for 2 rain. The experiment was repeated using a simple

Hypnosis as an Intervention for Pain Control

The use of formal hypnosis and/or positive, comforting suggestions to patients for control of pain, fear, and anxiety is simple and effective. In addition, it is easy to learn and teach to patients. Spiegel states that hypnosis, a group of techniques long associated with fantasies of loss of control, is ironically very helpful in actually enhancing patients' sense of control. The clinicians daring to become proficient in the use of hypnotic trance must begin with a conscious effort to abandon all negative suggestions such as "Do you have pain?"; "How much do you hurt?"; and "Move your bad leg." Simultaneously, a conscious effort is made to increase the use of the following positive suggestions: "How comfortable are you going to be tonight?" "Your hand feels so soft and warm"; "It is important to move this leg." These communication skills are best learned from clinicians skilled in hypnotherapeutic techniques. Simultaneously, it is important to become familiar with the works of Erikson and Barber. The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis will provide information about the national organizations and state hypnosis societies that offer approved workshops, conferences, and training opportunities. Hypnosis as analgesia surely provides rest, relaxation, and comfort for patients without the negative side effects of other analgesics. In addition, the ultimate benefit of hypnotic analgesia lies in enabling patients to potentiate their inner strength, resulting in improved self-esteem and self-control.

An analysis of the factors affecting haptic illusion of a rotated disk (author's transl)

Three experiments were performed to examine the factors affecting Cormack's haptic illusion that a disk held between the thumb and forefinger of one hand and turned by the fingers of the other hand feels longer in the direction of the turning hand. The illusion magnitunde increased with the disk size and was affected by the size of the comparison figures for judging the illusion magnitude. The illusion magnitude decreased for modified stimulus objects which function as disks only for the turning hand, but illusions in other objects which function as disks only for the holding hand was almost equal to that in the perfect disk. This illusion was concluded to be ascribed to the effect of the holding hand rather than that of the turning hand.

Hand Evaluation by Instrumentation

In textile industry, performance of the fabrics is still out of the engineering design, because of the difficulty in designing the proper mechanical properties of fabrics, and also of the difficulty in evaluating the performance where the evaluation has been done by a sensory method named “handfeel” by experts.In this article, recent developments in the Hand Evaluation and Standardization Committee (Chairman Sueo Kawabata, The Text. Mach. Soc. of Japan) during three years are introduced.The progress of the research is as following.1. Definition of primary hand feeling for clothing fabrics.2. Selection of the standard samples of hand feeling by 20 experts from textile industries in Japan.3. Representation of hand by numerical value (H.V., 0-10).4. Evaluation of H.V. by the experts for each of 1000 samples which were collected from many companies.5. Researches on physical and mechanical properties of fabrics especially on characterization method of those “non-linear” properties. Each of tensile, bending, shearing, compressional and surface properties are represented by two or three characteristic values.6. Mathematical and statistical analyses to join the experts' H.V. and the physical values.7. Formulas to translate physical values to H.V. were obtained.8. The following applications are introduced .1) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the total hand values from those primary hand values.2) Analyses of the good quality fabric.3) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the hand values of knitted fabric for men's out wear.4) Application of the formulas for hand calculation to the textured-knitted fabrics.5) Application to the establishment of the formulas for calculating the hand values of silk fabric for Kimono.6) Application to the process analisis in the textile mill, for example, the relation, between the finishing condition. and the hand of the fabrics finished, and the effect of the type of weaving machines such as shuttle loom, jet loom and rapier loom on the hand of the fabric produced by those.

Adaptation to displaced vision: visual, motor, or proprioceptive change?

After seeing his hand through wedge prisms, a subject points incorrectly with that hand at auditory as well as visual targets. The other hand is virtually unaffected. Thus the change cannot be solely visuo-motor or visual. Other evidence suggests that it is a change in felt hand location, rather than motor learning. When the subject's adapted hand feels as if it is pointing straight ahead, for example, it is actually pointing off to one side.