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 While close personal touch and meaningful social interactions with
other people have long been linked to better physical and mental
health, much of this research has focused on romantic or family
relationships, researchers note in the online journal PLOS ONE.
The current study focused on adults who were typically not married
or in long-term committed relationships, and still found a link
between simple touch - hugs - and better moods after people
experienced conflict.
For the study, researchers interviewed 404 men and women every night
for two weeks about a wide range of activities and interactions they
had experienced during the day as well as any positive or negative
moods. Just 98 of the participants were married or in what they
described as "marriage-like" relationships.
When people experienced conflicts, they noted a smaller decrease in
positive emotions and a smaller increase in negative feelings when
they had also received one or more hugs that day, the study found.
"We were not surprised to find that people who reported receiving a
hug appeared to be protected against poorer moods related to
experiencing conflict," said lead study author Michael Murphy of
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
"This finding is consistent with multiple emerging lines of evidence
demonstrating the ability of touch-behaviors within close
relationships to reduce perceptions of threat and increase feelings
of security and wellbeing," Murphy said by email. "We were, however,
at least somewhat surprised to find that there were no detectable
differences between women and men in our study in the extent to
which hugs protected against conflict-related negative mood."
Overall, participants reported experiencing conflicts on an average
of two days during the study; they reported receiving hugs, on
average, on almost nine days.
On any given day, about 10 percent of participants experienced
conflict and also received a hug, the study found. About 4 percent
of participants on any given day experienced conflict but didn't get
a hug.
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Marital status didn't appear to influence the connection between
hugs and mood. Neither did the amount of social support people
perceived in relationships with others.
Although the connection between hugs and mood also looked similar
for men and women, women did report more days of conflict and more
days of hugs than men.
The study wasn't a controlled experiment designed to prove whether
or how hugs might directly impact mood.
However, social interaction and touch have long been linked to
changes in the brain that can have a positive impact on physical and
mental health, noted Dr. Guohua Li, director of the Center for
Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia University in New
York City.
"There are multiple plausible mechanisms that may help explain the
observed benefits of hugs in reducing conflict-related negative
moods, including perceptual, psychological and neurobiological
pathways," Li, who wasn't involved in the study, said by email.
"It is well known that social interaction and engagement is
essential to the long-term survival of all social animals from ants
to chimpanzees and is beneficial to mental and physical health for
children and older adults," Li said.
"For infants, gentle and kind personal touch, dubbed as 'kangaroo
care' is found to have strong therapeutic effects and facilitate
positive neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes," Li added.
"This study indicates that the health benefits of social interaction
and engagement, in the form of hugs, also apply to young and
middle-aged adults."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2E24nrD PLOS ONE, online October 3, 2018.
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