Tiffany Martini Field is professor in the departments of pediatrics, psychology, and psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine and director of the Touch Research Institute.
[4] In 2014, Field became the first psychologist to receive the Golden Goose Award for federally funded research on infant massage, an honor she shared with Saul Schanberg, Cynthia Kuhn, and Gary Evoniuk who established the beneficial effects of massage on growth in studies of rat pups.
In one of her studies, premature infants received tactile/kinesthetic stimulation, consisting of body stroking and passive movements of the limbs, 3 times per day for 15 minutes over a 10-day period.
[14] Other research has focused on how massage during pregnancy and labor benefits the mother by decreasing levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
[15][16] Extending her research on the benefits of touch to treatments for pain, Field and her colleagues conducted research demonstrating that regular massages (15 minutes a day for 30 days) reduced pain among children suffering from rheumatoid arthritis when compared with a control group receiving relaxation therapy.