Hugging is not as straightforward as it may seem. Where do your arms go? How long is too long? Never fear, on NationalHuggingDay, science has your … back.
Love them or hate them, hugs are part of Western culture. They don’t just confer emotional closeness, they’ve been shown to improve our mental and physical health. But hugging is not as straightforward as it may seem. Where do your arms go? How long is too long? Never fear, science has your … back.
In a two-part study, researchers set out to discover what makes one hug better than another. In the first arm of the experiment, the team recruited 45 female college students and blindfolded them, one at a time. A female researcher then entered the room and hugged the participant for either 1, 5, or 10 seconds.
Each hug was performed in one of two ways. In the first, “crisscross” style, each hugger puts one arm over their partner’s shoulder and the other arm under their partner’s arm. In the second, called “neck-waist” style, the researcher put both arms under the participants’. In total, each participant received six hugs.
The volunteers consistently rated hugs lasting less than 1 second as the least pleasurable. On a pleasure scale of one to 100, the 1-second hugs averaged in the low 50s; the 5- and 10-second hugs scored in the high 60s, with no significant difference between the two longer durations. For all of the durations,If 10 seconds sounds like an uncomfortably long time to hug a stranger, you’re not alone. Düren says her team was surprised by the finding.
What happens after 10 seconds? Does the hug become even more pleasurable? Or does it get weird? “Something that I would’ve liked to see in the study is the condition where you really extend the hug even more,” says Julian Packheiser, a biopsychologist at Ruhr-University Bochum, who was not involved with the work but studies the effects of hugs on the body and brain.
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