Massage blunts the stress response in women, while the other forms of had gone largely unexamined and men had barely been studied at all. One lab took the commonest form of touch there is, the embrace, and had couples hug briefly before a laboratory stressor built to feel socially humiliating. , blood pressure and self-rated mood all got recorded. Which of the three moved?
Cortisol fell in the women, and nothing else moved. Women who embraced their partner before the stressor released less cortisol than women in the no-embrace control. Men who embraced their partner showed no such buffering. Blood pressure, which tracks the , did not differ between the groups, and neither did how stressed people said they felt afterward.
Social touch has a decent evidence base in one narrow corner. Massage reliably blunts both the hormonal and the sympathetic stress response in women. Everything else people actually do to one another, the embrace included, had been left largely untested, and men had barely been looked at.
The stressor here was the , which combines a hand held in ice water with an evaluator watching and a camera running. It is built to recruit the social fear of being judged on top of the physical discomfort, which is what makes it a reasonable stand-in for an interview or an exam.
Women who embraced their romantic partner shortly before the test released less cortisol than women in the control group, where no embrace occurred. In the men, no such buffering appeared. Whether that reflects a genuine sex difference, or a sample too small to catch a smaller effect in men, is not settled by one study.
The nulls deserve equal billing. Blood pressure, standing in for sympathetic nervous system activation, did not differ between embrace and control. Nor did the subjective ratings, so people who had been hugged did not report feeling any calmer. The honest summary is one measure in one sex. The authors still think it worth acting on before an examination or a difficult interview, and nobody should read it as a hug making stress feel better.
wat. A short hug before the stressor lowered the women’s cortisol, left the men unchanged, and altered nobody’s sense of being stressed.
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The gap between the hormone and the self-report is the finding to keep. The embrace changed what the body released and did not change how the stress felt, which is a warning about trusting either measure on its own.
How do we know?
Berretz and colleagues had romantic partners embrace briefly before the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test, then compared cortisol, blood pressure and affect ratings against a no-embrace control.
What is still unknown
A single laboratory study, one brief embrace, one stressor, and a null result in men that could reflect a real sex difference or simply too few men to see a smaller effect.
Learn something?
Where to next
Does holding someone’s hand change what fear looks like in the brain?touch
How do you get a brain to adopt a rubber hand as its own?touch
Which small moment between partners shows up again the next day?relationships