Scientists and romantics agree: Loved one's touch brings comfort
Benedict Carey | New York Times News Service
Posted March 13, 2006
Married women under extreme stress who reach out and hold their husbands' hands feel immediate relief, neuroscientists have found in what they say is the first study of how human touch affects the brain's response to threatening situations.
The soothing effect of the touch could be seen in scans of areas deep in the brain that are involved in registering emotional and physical alarm.
The women received significantly more relief from their husbands' touch than from a stranger's, and those in particularly close marriages were most deeply comforted by their husbands' hands, the study found.
The findings help explain one of the longest-standing puzzles in social science: why married men and women are healthier on average than their peers. Husbands and wives who are close tend to limit each other's excesses such as drinking and smoking but not enough to account for their better health compared with singles, researchers say.
"The effect of this simple gesture of social support is that the brain and body don't have to work as hard, they're less stressed in response to a threat," says Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the study's lead author. His co-authors were Dr. Hillary Schaefer and Dr. Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin. Their study will appear in the journal Psychological Science this year.
In situations that are nagging but not life-threatening, easy access to an affectionate touch, hug or back rub "is a very good thing, is deeply soothing," Coan says.
All of which also explains why the withdrawal of affectionate touch can be so upsetting. In research published last year, Dr. Ronald Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University, and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, reported that blisters lingered longer during marital strife.
And rejection, the ultimate withdrawal of touch, registers in the brain much like an electrical shock, says Dr. Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Fear of the shocks activated a region in the brain "that we saw activated in people looking at a beloved who had recently rejected them," Brown wrote in an e-mail message.
"Love has its risks," she added. "It can make us very unhappy," too.
