Due to their high levels of interest, young toddlers are wise beings. Babies experiment with and pick up knowledge from their surroundings. Baby learning includes social and emotional tasks and physical, cognitive, and language development.
According to research published in the journal Science, young babies have a unique way of determining when people are close to one another even before they can speak. According to the study’s authors, sharing saliva-producing activities like kisses or ice cream cones with family or close friends is more common than sharing such activities with strangers or coworkers. Therefore, sharing saliva during sexual acts can indicate a “thick relationship” or two individuals with strong emotional bonds, such as parents, siblings, other family members, or close friends.
As a result, young toddlers are prone to picking up social cues from others around them. Therefore, Thomas and colleagues turned to trials with adults interacting with puppets to explore if children, even babies, and toddlers, might use saliva sharing as a cue for close ties. They came up with a fascinating conclusion that we will discuss in this article.
Humans must learn about social relationships to function effectively in society. People from different cultural backgrounds differentiate a specific type of relationship that we shall refer to as “thick” Thick relationships, which are frequently but not always between close genetic relatives, are characterized by high degrees of attachment, duties, reciprocal responsiveness, and a sense of the oneness that is defined in terms of shared physiological substance.
Young people have a dilemma since only some relationships are thick: how do they know which ones? Different relationship groups can be spoken to and designated explicitly for older kids. According to anthropologists, young children and even infants need to be aware of how relationships are expressed in different kinds of encounters.
Thick relationships, for instance, are characterized by behaviors that entail the deliberate, voluntary transfer of saliva, such as kissing or sharing eating utensils. The researchers tested whether young children, toddlers, and infants infer that two people who share saliva are likely to be in a thick relationship using experimental approaches from developmental Science.
Children in the first experiment saw interactions between cartoon characters. The young children expected that while sharing toys and proportionable food would occur equally throughout friendships and families, sharing utensils or licking the same food item would only occur within nuclear families. Thus, young children understand that interactions, including saliva exchange, are unique to nuclear families.
The researchers then assessed toddlers’ and babies’ ability to predict that when two people share saliva, those people will be more emotionally receptive in subsequent interactions.
Children as young as toddlers and babies saw a center puppet shift between playing ball with one actor and sharing the same orange slice with her. They then noticed the puppet seeming distressed while seated between the two actresses. The researchers counted which actress participants glanced at first and for longer periods, anticipating a response from the actress to the puppet’s anguish. The actor who had swapped food and saliva with the puppet caught the attention of both toddlers and babies initially and for a longer period.
Further experiments showed that toddlers and babies only turned to the actress who shared their food and saliva when the central puppet displayed distress and only when the distressed puppet was the actress’ thick relative.
The researchers produced a second, comparable film to make sure it wasn’t just food sharing that appeared to lead babies to infer the existence of a deep social connection. Instead of sharing an orange slice this time, a woman just placed her finger in her mouth, placed it in the mouth of a purple puppet, and then placed it back in her mouth.
Later, the same woman also interacted with a green puppet, touching both its and her own foreheads. Following that, the woman appeared to be in despair while the purple and green puppets watched.
Children of all ages stared at the purple puppet that had the closer, more personal interaction with the finger in the mouth, as though anticipating this puppet to be more impacted by the woman’s worry, maybe because they appeared to be in a closer relationship.
Researchers also looked at older kids between the ages of 5 and 7 and told them about different kids sharing things. Even though the scientists never specifically mentioned spit, some of the sharing required coming into contact with saliva. Children of the age range assumed that while sharing toys or dividing meals might be family, sharing utensils or bites of food might be friends.
According to the researchers, these findings not only provide light on what young infants understand about the social structures present in their environment but also raise additional issues about how toddlers pick up these expectations and whether they might be common.
However, the researchers also pointed out that it is not quite obvious how the results apply to young children’s day-to-day activities. To better understand the impact saliva may play on how infants and toddlers differentiate between different sorts of connections, future trials might replace the actresses in the study with family members or teachers. A function for other cues, including hugging, is also possible.
The study did not compare results across cultures and solely looked at kids living in the United States. Even still, the results are intriguing, and it would be intriguing to discover how children from tribes with various dietary or hygiene customs might respond to similar circumstances.
Thomas, A. J., Woo, B., Nettle, D., Spelke, E., & Saxe, R. (2022). Early concepts of intimacy: Young humans use saliva sharing to infer close relationships. Science, 375(6578), 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abh1054
