INTRODUCTION
All over the world, hugging is recognized as a common form of greeting. Depending on culture, context and relationship, a hug can indicate familiarity, love, affection or friendship. One person may also hug another as an indicator of support, comfort, and consolation. In some cultures and for some people, especially between strangers, a hug may not be the norm and can be considered as invasion of private space.
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There has been extensive research carried out and literature published on the psychological benefits of being hugged. While most people have an innate physical and emotional need to be touched and hugged, especially by their loved ones, there is very little understanding of its health consequences. In this article I’ll share findings gained through scientific research on hugging another person.
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Hugging is an extremely positive form of communication. It expresses the values of love, approval, gratitude and forgiveness. Hugging is a great form of emotional satisfaction, but it also has some surprising health benefits. In this article we will share with you the health benefits of hugging – the ones you probably haven´t thought about.
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Sometimes, the most beneficial things in life are the simplest. One of them is hugging. At some time we all have experienced the feeling of comfort and security of a warm and loving hug. There’s nothing that make us feel better than a good, solid squeeze from a friend or a loved one. But the benefits of hugging go beyond feeling good.
Studies conducted in several Universities have found that a simple cuddle is a powerful therapeutic mechanism. These studies have found that hugs can improve the health of your heart, lower your blood pressure, increase your immunity, and help you fight stress and anxiety. Of course, hugs also strengthen feelings of bonding.
According to a report in The Independent, the benefits of hugging are so widely recognized in the US that hugs are prescribed instead of medication. It adds that “hug therapy” is being promoted as a way to tackle with depression, reduce social isolation and foster feelings of belonging.
According to Kathleen Keating, author of The Hug Therapy, we need to recognize that every human being has a profound physical and emotional need for touch. She adds, “[t]here’s something godlike everyone possesses in our arms, hands, fingers. This is the power to make someone feel cherished … the power to give (and receive at the same time!) kindness, warmth, tenderness, support, healing, and most of all belonging.
Hugging is such a basic need that not only must we indulge in it as frequently as we can, we must encourage others too to follow suit. So, the next time you feel like hugging someone, don’t hold yourself back. Cuddle wholeheartedly. Don’t be in a hurry to get it over and done with. Don’t think of it as a chore. It’s a beautiful expression of affection that also promotes healing and good health. So hug for a happier, healthier world.
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The healing hormone responsible for this is oxytocin, also known as the “bonding hormone”. By physically touching someone you care about, such as giving a hug, the levels of oxytocin made by your brain, markedly rise. This causes you – and the person you hugged – to feel calm, happier and more connected as well as producing other health benefits.
Oxytocin has long been known as the “pair bonding” hormone and the “cuddle” hormone for its effect on stable monogamous relationships. Initial research in early 1990’s found that breastfeeding women tended to have lower blood pressure. Lactation is a time when huge amounts of oxytocin are released from the brain to the breast tissue allowing milk to flow. The connection between decreased blood pressure and oxytocin then led to further investigation into its breadth and healing power. Oxytocin receptors have now been identified in other tissues, including the heart, kidney, thymus, and pancreas.
New exciting research has shown that oxytocin can play a powerful role in protecting your heart. By touching another person, oxytocin is produced in your heart and travels throughout your blood vessels dilating them through a mechanism of increased nitric oxide. Nitric oxide dilates our blood vessels, leading to a decrease in blood pressure, less inflammation and less plaque build-up. Excess chronic inflammation is the key player in plaque buildup in our arteries, known as atherosclerosis. Oxytocin has been shown to reduce free radical formation and other inflammatory markers decreasing the risk for heart attack.
At the University of Miami, researchers placed blood vessel cells under stress in the laboratory. Stress was meant to mimic stress conditions in our arteries, such as when a person is under chronic stress from working too many hours at a demanding job. Unsurprisingly, high levels of free radicals and inflammation were seen in the blood vessel cells. By adding oxytocin to the cells, the amount of free radical and inflammation, was reduced by 24 and 26 percent, respectively.
Heart disease, stroke and heart attacks, are the number one killer of men and women in the United States today. Think about this – you could reduce your rate (as well as your partner’s) of cardiovascular disease simply by giving them a hug. Studies done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that women who reported the most amounts of hugs with their partner had the highest levels of oxytocin. And they also had the lowest blood pressure!
Other forms of touch, such as holding hands, kissing and cuddling, giving and receiving a foot massage or backrub can produce this beneficial effect. In fact, you can also practice mind-body exercises, such as deep breathing exercises and yoga, and increase your oxytocin levels.
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With the already known and still-to-emerge health and quality of life benefits derived from the natural release of oxytocin in your body, what are you waiting for? Start cultivating warm, loving, intimate relationships, no matter what stage of life you are in.
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Regular embraces can lower the risk of heart disease, combat stress and fatigue, boost the immune system, fight infections and ease depression, according to a new study.
Just ten seconds of hugging can lower blood pressure and after this time elapses, levels of feel-good hormones such as oxytocin increase, while the amounts of stress chemicals, including cortisol, drop.
"The positive emotional experience of hugging gives rise to biochemical and physiological reactions," says psychologist Dr Jan Astrom, who led the study report published in the journal Comprehensive Psychology.
A second study has also found that after ten seconds of hugging, levels of various hormones in men and women aged 20 to 49 changed.
What is oxytocin?
Oxytocin is secreted by the body during childbirth and in breastfeeding, where it stimulates release of milk. Until recently, its effects were thought to be confined to just that.
But research is increasingly showing that it seems to have many more effects, from improving social skills to combating stress and encouraging trust.
So how does hugging come in to this? Well, the skin also contains a network of tiny, egg-shaped pressure centres called Pacinian corpuscles that can sense touch and which are in contact with the brain through the vagus nerve.
The vagus nerve winds its way through the body and is connected to a number of organs, including the heart. It is also connected to oxytocin receptors.
One theory - like the one used in this study - is that stimulation of the vagus triggers an increase in oxytocin, which in turn leads to the cascade of health benefits.
So go on - hug your way to happiness!
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Touch has been described as the most fundamental means of contact with the world (Barnett, 1972) and the simplest and most straightforward of all sensory systems (Geldard, 1960). Touch is vital in several domains of the infant's and child's life, including social, cognitive, and physical development (e.g., Field, 2001). Touch continues to play a central role in adulthood when flirting, expressing power, soothing, playing, and maintaining proximity between child and caretaker (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). As with humans, touch serves many functions in nonhuman primates. Different species groom to reconcile following aggressive encounters, to initiate sexual encounters, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain proximity with caretakers, and to sooth conspecifics during stress (de Waal, 1989).

Despite the importance of touch in several key domains of social life, its role in the communication of emotion has received little attention compared with facial and vocal displays of emotion (Stack, 2001). In fact, one finds virtually no mention of touch in reference works in the field of affective science (e.g.,Davidson, Scherer, & Goldsmith, 2003). On the basis of the limited research that has been conducted on touch and emotion, two general claims have been made regarding the role of touch in emotional communication. First, touch has been claimed to communicate the hedonic value of emotions (i.e., either positive or negative; Jones & Yarbrough, 1985; Knapp & Hall, 1997). Second, touch was thought to merely amplify the intensity of emotional displays from the face and voice (Knapp & Hall, 1997).
Recently, Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) documented that strangers in Spain and the United States could accurately decode distinct emotions when they were touched by another person. These findings challenge claims that touch solely serves as a general hedonic signaling system or an intensifier of other emotion signaling systems. In this research, two strangers interacted in a room where they were separated by a barrier. They could not see one another, but they could reach each other through a hole in the barrier. One person touched the other on the forearm, instructed to convey each of 12 different emotions. After each touch, the person touched had to choose which emotion s/he thought the encoder was communicating.
The results indicated that participants could decode anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy at above-chance levels, but not tactile expressions of happiness, surprise, sadness, embarrassment, envy, and pride. Accuracy rates ranged from 48% to 83% for the accurately decoded emotions. In addition, extensive behavioral coding identified specific tactile behaviors specific to each emotion. For example, sympathy was associated with stroking and patting, anger was associated with hitting and squeezing, disgust was associated with a pushing motion, and fear was associated with trembling.
The primary purpose of the current investigation was to significantly extend our understanding of the degree to which touch can communicate distinct emotions. Our study was guided by four motivations. First, the current study provides greater ecological validity than previous studies. In Hertenstein, Keltner, and colleagues' (2006) studies, participants communicating emotion were allowed to touch the other member of the dyad only on the bottom half of the arm—a constrained context. In the current study, encoders (those attempting to communicate the emotions) were allowed to touch the other member of the dyad (i.e., the decoder) anywhere on the body that was appropriate.1 This more closely approximates how people rely on touch to communicate in more naturalistic settings (Jones & Yarbrough, 1985).
Second, we sought to replicate previous findings showing that touch communicates emotion. Hertenstein, Keltner, et al. (2006) provided only one large-scale study to provide evidence that touch communicates six distinct emotions—anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy. If touch, in fact, communicates these emotions in a constrained paradigm, one would expect these same emotions to be communicated in a less constrained, whole-body paradigm such as the one used in the current study.
Third, we sought to investigate whether touch on the whole body could communicate more distinct emotions than known heretofore. Hertenstein, Keltner, et al. (2006) provided evidence that touch can communicate three negatively valenced emotions—anger, fear, and disgust—and three prosocial emotions—love, gratitude, and sympathy. Because encoders in the current investigation were allowed to touch the other member of the dyad anywhere on the body, the location, as well as the types of touch used, provided decoders with additional information to interpret the tactile communications. Given the greater complexity of tactile signals permitted in the current paradigm, we predicted that touch on the whole body would allow more emotions to be communicated than in the first study of touch and emotion.
Finally, the field of emotion has advanced by developing precise descriptions of emotion-specific signals (Ekman, 1993; Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer, 2003). As mentioned, the current experimental paradigm provided encoders with more degrees of freedom to communicate various emotions than previous work. Analyses of tactile behaviors in the current study yield a more precise behavioral description of how touch communicates emotion as compared to previous work (Hertenstein, Keltner, et al., 2006).
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