Have you ever received a comforting hug at the end of a stressful day, or a gentle pat on the shoulder when you’re feeling down? You may relate to the positive reinforcement that consensual touch can bring. But the question remains: Does touch actually help you feel better, and does it matter who the hug is from or how you’re touched?
To uncover these answers, researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience’s Social Brain Lab and Essen University Hospital conducted a large-scale analysis of studies exploring contact interventions. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, reveal how consensual touch can benefit physical and mental well-being, including reducing pain, anxiety, stress, and depression in adults. I made it.
“This is especially important given how often touch interventions are overlooked,” said first author Packheiser.
“A key challenge for our research is to leverage the hundreds of individual studies out there to identify which types of touch are most effective,” added Professor Keysers, director of the Social Brain Lab. Masu. “What do you do when you don’t have a friend or partner nearby to give you a hug? Does touch from a stranger or a machine work? And how often? This study shows that touch can actually be optimized. , but the most important factor is not necessarily the person we suspect.”
According to researchers, who touches you, how you’re touched, and how long it lasts makes no difference in terms of impact. A long massage from a therapist can be as effective as a simple hug from a friend, unless you consider the frequency of the intervention. The more frequently a touch intervention is provided, the greater its impact. So if you hug often, a simple hug can have an even bigger impact than a massage. Object and robot hug interventions have been shown to be just as effective as human hugs in improving physical health.
“There are a lot of people who need to improve their well-being, perhaps not only because they are lonely, but also because they may be suffering from clinical symptoms. We show that even a blanket you put on has the potential to improve well-being. “Help those people,” explains final author Frédéric Michon. However, the benefits of robot and object interventions are less effective for psychological well-being. Therefore, mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression may require human contact after all, “perhaps suggesting the importance of the emotional component associated with contact,” Michon said. he points out.
“It would be useful to investigate whether touching animals and pets improves well-being, and conversely whether animals and pets benefit from being touched, but unfortunately we cannot draw general conclusions. “There just aren’t enough studies or well-controlled studies on these topics,” Michon revealed.
When examining the effects of touch on newborn babies, researchers found that babies benefited greatly from touch, but the benefits were greater when the touch was performed by parents rather than health care workers. It was much bigger. However, due to a lack of research, it has proven quite difficult to draw conclusions about the effects of contact on children and adolescents.
“This discovery could have implications,” Packheiser added. “The knowledge that mortality rates from premature birth are high in some countries and that babies benefit more from parental touch provides another easily implemented form of keeping babies healthy. .”
“Large studies like this help us draw more general conclusions, but also help us identify where research is lacking,” Michon explains. “We hope that our findings will inform future research to explore lesser-known questions. This includes not only contact with animals, but also contact across ages and It also includes exposure to specific clinical settings, such as those with autism, which is another category that has not been widely investigated.”
Attached video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Z-hVt_8QI
