The Verny Award of 2005

APPPAH Honors Tiffany Field

The 2005 nominee for the Thomas R. Verny Award for Outstanding Contributions to Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health is developmental psychologist Tiffany M. Field, Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Psychology at the University of Miami School of Medicine. She will receive the award and speak on the opening night of the Congress in San Diego.

     This Award was created with a dual purpose to honor the visionary founder and first president of APPPAH whose writings and lectures world-wide helped to establish the emerging field of prenatal and perinatal psychology and to honor other extraordinary contributors to this special area of study. Given first in 1993 and at each biennial congress since, the Association has celebrated anthropologist Ashley Montagu, psychologist Beatriz Manrique of Venezuela, primal health pioneer Michel Odent of London, psychologist David Chamberlain, psychoanalyst Ludwig Janus of Heidelberg, and innovative parenting educator, Laura Huxley.

     Since her dissertation research on maternal-infant face-to-face interactions for her doctoral degree in developmental psychology in 1977, Tiffany Field has been at the forefront of intimate and innovative exploration of earliest development. Never in doubt about the sentience of premies and term newborns, and profoundly moved by her personal experiences in childbirth, she has constantly worked to extend scientific knowledge of infant capacities. Many of her experiments have illuminated the psychology of the newborn. In 1982 and 1983, her work confirmed that both term newborns and premature babies were capable of imitating adult facial expressions of happiness, sadness, and surprise, adding a new emotional dimension to the pioneering work of Meltzoff & Moore (1977) on imitation of exaggerated facial gestures. Soon afterward Field et al. (1984) rolled back another boundary, showing that newborns could discriminate the faces of their mothers from the faces of strangers after only four hours of periodic exposure scattered over the first few days after hospital birth. (A summary of early work with infant perception, learning and memory is found in Field (1990), Infancy.)

     Tiffany has spent almost her entire career at Mailman Center for Child Development at the University of Miami, in close association with the Medical School and Hospital where over a thousand babies a year are served by the NICU and are seen in follow-up clinics for several years. In this training and research setting, she has prepared a new generation of medical and psychology interns to collaborate in baby care, and at the same time rapidly became a prolific and preeminent researcher in infant behavior.

Dramatic findings that massage strokes could speed the growth and wellbeing of premature babies made headlines (Field, Schanberg, Scafidi, et al., 1986) and led, in 1992, to the formation of the Touch Research Institute--the world’s first scientific institute devoted to the study of touch. It was located just down the hall from the NICU where so much had already been done. From the beginning TRI was designed to be international in scope, multidisciplinary, and to involve multiuniversity faculties in four different places: the medical schools at University of Miami, of course, plus the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Paris, and at the Philippines Medical Center. Tiffany Field is Director.

In a long series of studies, Field and colleagues identified, one by one, all the routine stresses of neonatal intensive care and systematically developed ways of reducing stress on the youngest and most vulnerable babies utilizing the sense of touch. Similarly, an ambitious series of experiments have probed multiple facets of the distinctive interactions of infants with depressed mothers. This new knowledge and practice is summarized in two books. The first, Tiffany Field (2000), Touch Therapy, addresses how touch is applied to enhance growth, reduce pain, improve attentiveness, alleviate depression and anxiety, and deal with immune and autoimmune disorders. This volume lists the TRI articles published to date as well as published  Reviews of the literature, and their ongoing studies. The second book by Field ( 2001) is Touch, a broad overview of touch including touch hunger, touch as communication, touch deprivation, touch therapies, and massage therapy for infants, children, adolescents and adults.

Already, in over 100 published works, Tiffany Field and colleagues are changing the lives of neonates born at risk while creating a new encyclopedia of knowledge about the healing power of touch.