New study highlights the benefit of touch on mental and physical health
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience - KNAW
You might recognize the comforting feeling when someone offers you a hug at the end of a stressful day or strokes your shoulder when you're feeling down. But the question remains: can touch really help you feel better, and does it matter who it's from or how they touch you?
To explore
these questions, researchers from the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands
Institute for Neuroscience and the University Hospital Essen conducted a
large-scale analysis of studies exploring touch interventions.
The benefits of touch on mental and physical health
Does touch truly improve someone's wellbeing? It is an easy question to ask but more complicated to answer. Individual studies often only focus on specific instances and may contradict each other.
Combining all these studies together for a large-scale analysis offers a clearer answer: yes, touch substantially improves both physical and mental wellbeing, for example via reduction of pain, anxiety, depression, and stress in adults.
But in fact,
those with physical or mental health problems (and therefore most in need of
support) benefit even more from touch than healthy adults. "This is
especially relevant considering how often touch interventions are
overlooked" Packheiser, first author, adds.
"A key question of our study is to leverage the hundreds of individual studies out there to identify what type of touch works best," adds professor Keysers, director of the Social Brain Lab.
"What if you don't have a friend or partner close by to hug you? Would
touch from a stranger or even a machine also help? And how often? The study
clearly shows that touch can indeed be optimized, but the most important
factors are not necessarily those we suspect."
Interestingly, the person touching you, how they touch you, and the duration of their touch doesn't make a difference in terms of impact. A long-lasting massage by a therapist could therefore be just as effective as a quick hug offered by a friend.
That is, until the frequency of
the intervention is considered. The more often a touch intervention is offered,
the greater the impact. A quick hug could therefore be even more impactful than
a massage if it is offered more frequently.
Human or non-human touch?
The next question was whether touch intervention needs to be human at all. As it turns out, object or robot interventions can be equally effective at improving physical wellbeing.
"There are lots of people in need of wellbeing improvements, perhaps because they're lonely but also because they may be inflicted by clinical conditions. These results indicate that a touch-robot, or even a simple weighted blanket has the potential to help those people," last author Frédéric Michon explains.
However, the benefits of
robot and object interventions are less effective for mental wellbeing. Mental
health disorders like anxiety or depression might therefore require human touch
after all, "perhaps suggestive of the importance for an emotional
component associated with the touch," Michon point out.
While the researchers were equally curious about
human-to-animal contact, studies exploring this question are still lacking.
"It would be useful to see whether an animal's or pet's touch could
improve wellbeing, and inversely if they also benefit from it, but
unfortunately there simply aren't enough studies, or properly controlled ones,
for us to draw any general conclusions on these topics," Michon clarifies.
Touch interventions across ages
When the team looked into the impact of touch on newborns, they found out that newborns also benefited significantly from touch. However, the person conducting the touch intervention was more important: the benefits of touch are higher when done by a parent instead of a healthcare worker.
"This finding could be impactful," Packheiser adds.
"Death rates due to premature births are high in some countries and the
knowledge that a baby benefits more from the touch of their own parent offers another
easily implementable form of support for the baby's health."
Due to a lack of studies, it proved difficult to draw conclusions about children and teenagers. "Large scale studies like this help us draw more general conclusions but they also help us identify where research is lacking," Michon explains.
"We hope that our findings can steer future research to explore lesser-known questions. This includes animal touch, but also touch across ages, and in specific clinical settings like autistic patients, another category that has not been explored extensively."
