A shared universe › Blog › What a hug does · Español
In a hospital waiting room, at a goodbye or in the kitchen at home, there are moments when no phrase is equal to the occasion. Then someone gives a hug, or takes a hand, and something loosens inside. This very simple gesture has been studied more than you might think.
In 2009, a team at the University of Gothenburg, including Line Löken and Håkan Olausson, studied nerve fibres in the skin called C-tactile fibres. They found that these responded mainly to slow strokes, at between one and ten centimetres per second, exactly the ones participants found most pleasant. The authors proposed that these fibres are a special pathway for affectionate touch between people.
In 2015, Sheldon Cohen and his team at Carnegie Mellon University published an unusual study. For fourteen nights in a row they phoned 404 healthy adults, aged between 18 and 55, and asked whether they had had a conflict with anyone that day and whether they had been given a hug. Afterwards they exposed them to a cold virus and kept them in quarantine for a few days to see who fell ill.
Frequent conflicts increased the risk of infection, but that increase was smaller in people who felt supported by those close to them, and hugs accounted for about a third of that protection. Among those who caught the virus, receiving hugs more often was associated with milder symptoms.
It is an observational study, not an experiment, and the authors themselves do not know whether what protects is the touch itself or what the hug means: that someone is with you.
With the same participants, Cohen’s team looked in 2018 at what happened to mood. On days with some conflict, those who received a hug felt less of a low and less distress, and the next day they carried less distress with them. It was the same for men and women, and for people with a partner and people without one.
In 2006, the psychologist James Coan, with Hillary Schaefer and Richard Davidson, asked sixteen married women to lie in a brain scanner while being warned that they might receive an electric shock. Sometimes they waited holding their husband’s hand, sometimes a stranger’s and sometimes no one’s. With the husband’s hand, the areas of the brain that react to threat were largely calmed; with a stranger’s, they were too, though less. And the better the marriage, the greater the effect.
It was a small study. Coan’s laboratory has gone on studying it with more than a hundred people, holding the hand of their partner or of a friend, and the calming effect of that hand is still seen. What is still debated is how it works in the brain.
In 2024, a team led by Julian Packheiser, of Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), analysed together 137 studies on the effect of physical touch on health. In adults, touch reduced pain, anxiety and feelings of depression, and for mood it helped people who were ill more than healthy ones. Touch from objects or robots had similar effects on the body, but considerably smaller ones on mood. And in adults it made no difference whether it came from someone they knew or from a healthcare professional.
In 2011, the researcher Emese Nagy measured the spontaneous hugs seen at the 2008 Olympic Games: they lasted about three seconds. In 2021, a team at Goldsmiths, University of London, asked the participants in their study to give hugs of one, five or ten seconds. The one-second hugs turned out to be the least pleasant and the ones that did least to improve mood straight afterwards.
Nobody needs a stopwatch, but a hug that doesn’t end straight away says “I’m in no hurry, I’m here”.
Not everyone experiences touch in the same way. For some people a hug is comforting and for others, at a bad moment, it is suffocating. And the same person may need it one day and want nothing to do with it the next.
Beside someone who is ill, touch can say what you don’t know how to say. If you are also looking for words, there are ideas about what to say to someone who is ill.
In A shared universe there are no hugs, but there is something like one: a touch on the star of someone you don’t know. They won’t know it was you, but they will know someone was there.