A hug, a handshake, a therapeutic massage. A newborn baby lying on a mother’s bare chest.
Physical touch can boost well-being and reduce pain, depression and anxiety, according to a major new review of published research released Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Researchers from Germany and the Netherlands systematically reviewed years of research on touching, stroking, hugging and caressing. They also combined data from 137 studies, which included nearly 13,000 adults, children and infants. Each study compared individuals who were physically touched in some way during an experiment — or touched something like a fuzzy stuffed toy — with similar individuals who were not.
For example, a study showed that daily 20-minute gentle massage for six weeks in elderly people with dementia decreased aggressiveness and reduced levels of a stress marker in the blood. One more found that massages boosted the mood of breast cancer patients. A study even showed that healthy young adults petting a robotic baby seal were happier, and felt less pain from a mild heat stimulus, than those reading an article about an astronomer.
The positive effects are particularly noticeable in premature babies, who “massively improve” with skin-to-skin contact, said Frédéric Michon, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and one of the with- study author.
“There have been many claims that touch is good, touch is healthy, touch is something we all need,” said Rebecca Boehme, a neuroscientist at Linkoping University in Sweden, who reviewed the study for the journal . “But really, no one has looked at it from a broad, bird’s-eye view.”
The analysis revealed some interesting and sometimes mysterious patterns. Among adults, sick people showed greater mental health benefits from touch than healthy people. Who does the touching — a familiar person or a health care worker — doesn’t matter. But the source of touch is important to newborns.
“An intriguing finding that needs further support is that newborn babies benefit more from the touch of their parents than from the touch of a stranger,” said Ville Harjunen, a researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who also reviewed the study for the journal. Babies’ preferences for their parents may be related to smell, he speculates, or to differences in the way parents handle them.
Women seem to benefit more from touch than men, which may be a cultural effect, Dr. Michon. Frequency of touch is also important: A massage once every two years won’t do much.
Some studies included in the review looked at what happened at the height of the Covid pandemic, when people were isolated and had less physical contact with others. “They found correlations during the Covid era between lack of touch and aspects of health such as depression and anxiety,” said Dr. Michon.
Touching the head appears to have more beneficial effects than touching the body, some studies have found. Dr. could not explain. Michon that finding, but thought it might have something to do with more nerve endings in the face and scalp.
Another mystery: Studies of people in South America tend to show stronger health benefits of touch than studies looking at people in North America or Europe. said Dr. Michon that culture may play a role. But said Dr. Boehme notes that studies showing differences between countries are too small to be definitive. “I think the mechanism behind it is biological,” he said. “I think that’s tough and it’s going to be the same for all of us.”
In 2023, Jeeva Sankar, a pediatrics researcher at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and a colleague published a rigorous review of skin-to-skin care for newborns. The review concluded that touch therapy for preterm or low-birth-weight babies should begin as soon as possible and last eight hours or more, a recommendation endorsed by the World Health Organization. said Dr. Sankar said the new test is important because touch is often neglected in modern medical care, but it is too broad. She would like to focus more on how different forms of touch can be integrated into medical care.
Dr. emphasized Michon that the types of relationships considered in these studies are positive experiences that the volunteers agree with. “If someone doesn’t feel a touch as pleasant, they’re likely to be stressed,” he says.
