Summary: Touch interventions significantly benefit both physical and mental health, with particular benefits for individuals facing health challenges. The study, which pooled hundreds of individual studies, demonstrated that the nature of the touch, the person doing it, or the duration mattered less than the frequency, suggesting that even brief interactions like hugs can be profoundly impactful.
Furthermore, while touch from objects or robots can improve physical well-being, human touch appears to be essential for alleviating mental illness, highlighting the emotional component of touch. The research also highlights the increased benefits of parental touch for newborns, highlighting its potential to support infant health in critical care situations.
Key facts:
- Touch interventions effectively reduce pain, anxiety, depression and stress, with greater benefits seen in those with pre-existing health conditions.
- The frequency of touch has a more significant impact on well-being than the duration or source of touch, highlighting the effectiveness of even small gestures of connection.
- While non-human touch can support physical health, human touch is critical for psychological well-being, indicating the importance of emotional connection in touch interventions.
source: KNOW
You may recognize the comforting feeling when someone offers you a hug at the end of a stressful day or pats you on the shoulder when you’re feeling down. But the question remains: can touch really make you feel better, and does it matter who it’s from and how they’re being touched?
To investigate 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 investigating touch interventions.
The benefits of touch on mental and physical health
Does touch really improve one’s well-being? The question is easy to ask, but more difficult to answer. Individual studies often focus only on specific cases and can be contradictory.
Combining all these studies together for a large-scale analysis offers a clearer answer: yes, touch significantly improves both physical and mental well-being, for example by reducing 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 particularly relevant given how often touch interventions are overlooked,” adds Packheiser, first author.
“A key question of our study is to use the hundreds of individual studies to determine 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 nearby to hug you? Would a touch from a stranger or even a machine help too? And how often? The study clearly shows that touch can indeed be optimized, but the most important factors are not necessarily the ones we suspect.”
Interestingly, the person touching you, how they touch you, and the duration of the touch make no difference in terms of impact. Therefore, a long massage from a therapist can be just as effective as a quick hug from a friend.
That is, until the frequency of the intervention is assessed. The more often a touch intervention is offered, the greater the impact. Therefore, a quick hug can be even more impactful than a massage if offered more often.
Human or non-human touch?
The next question was whether touch intervention should be human at all. As it turns out, interventions by objects or robots can be equally effective in improving physical well-being.
“There are many people who need to improve their wellbeing, perhaps because they are lonely, but also because they may be caused by clinical conditions. These results show that a sensory robot or even a simple weighted blanket has the potential to help these people,” explains last author Frédéric Michon.
However, the benefits of robot and object interventions are less effective for mental well-being. Mental disorders such as anxiety or depression may therefore require human touch after all, “perhaps suggesting the importance of the emotional component associated with touch,” Michonne points out.
Although researchers have been equally curious about human-animal contact, studies investigating this issue are still lacking.
“It would be useful to see if touching an animal or pet can improve well-being and vice versa if they also benefit from it, but unfortunately there are simply not enough studies or properly controlled to draw any general conclusions about these topics,” he clarifies. Michonne.
Sensory interventions across the ages
When the team studied the impact of touch on newborns, they found that newborns also benefit significantly from touch. However, the person delivering the touch intervention is more important: the benefits of touch are greater when it is delivered by a parent rather than a healthcare worker.
“This finding could be impactful,” adds Packheiser.
“Mortality due to preterm birth is high in some countries, and knowing that a baby benefits more from the touch of its own parent offers another easily implemented form of support for baby health.”
Due to a lack of studies, it has 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 guide future research to investigate lesser-known questions. This includes animal touch, but also touch across ages and in specific clinical settings such as autistic patients, another category that has not been extensively studied.
For this news about mental health research and touch
Author: Elin Feenstra
source: KNOW
Contact: Elin Feenstra – I KNOW
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Free access.
“A systematic review and multivariate meta-analysis of the physical and mental health benefits of touch interventions” by Christian Keysers et al. Nature Human Behavior
Summary
A systematic review and multivariate meta-analysis of the physical and mental health benefits of touch interventions
Receiving touch is extremely important, as many studies have shown that touch promotes mental and physical well-being.
We conducted a pre-registered (PROSPERO: CRD42022304281) systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis covering 137 studies in the meta-analysis and 75 additional studies in the systematic review (n= 12,966 individuals, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science search through October 1, 2022) to identify critical factors that moderate the efficacy of the touch intervention.
Included studies always included a touch or non-touch intervention with different health outcomes as dependent variables. Risk of bias was assessed by small study bias, randomization, consistency, productivity and bias.
Touch interventions are particularly effective in regulating cortisol levels (Hedges’ g= 0.78, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.24 to 1.31) and weight gain (0.65, 95% CI 0.37 to 0.94) in neonates, as well as pain reduction ( 0.69, 95% CI 0.48 to 0.89), feeling depressed ( 0.59, 95% CI 0.40 to 0.78) and state ( 0.64, 95% CI 0.44 to 0 .84) or trait anxiety (0.59, 95% CI 0.40 to 0.77) for adults.
Comparing touch interventions involving objects or robots resulted in similar physical (0.56, 95% CI 0.24 to 0.88 vs 0.51, 95% CI 0.38 to 0.64) but more low mental health benefits (0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.49 vs 0.58, 95% CI 0.43 to 0.73). Elderly clinical cohorts gained more strongly in mental health compared to healthy subjects (0.63, 95% CI 0.46 to 0.80 vs 0.37, 95% CI 0.20 to 0.55).
We found no difference in health benefits in adults when comparing touch applied by an acquaintance or a health professional (0.51, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.73 vs 0.50, 95% CI 0.38 to 0, 61), but parental touch was more beneficial in neonates (0.69, 95% CI 0.50 to 0.88 vs 0.39, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.61). Small but significant small study biases and the inability to blind the experimental conditions should be considered.
Utilizing factors that influence the efficacy of a touch intervention will help maximize the benefits of future interventions and focus research in this area.
