Whether it is a hug from a friend or the caress of a weighted blanket, the sensation of touch appears to bring benefits for the body and mind, researchers say.
The sense of touch is the first to develop in babies and is crucial in allowing us to experience the environment around us as well as communicate. Indeed, the loss of touch from others during the Covid pandemic hit many hard.
However, while myriad studies have suggested touch is beneficial for our health, few have attempted to draw the vast field of research together.
Now experts have done just that, revealing a simple message: touch helps.
Dr Helena Hartmann, a co-author of the research from University Hospital Essen, said: “More consensual touch events throughout our day can help alleviate or potentially buffer against mental and physical complaints.”
Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the research encompassed 212 previously published studies and included a statistical analysis of 85 studies involving adults and 52 involving newborns.
Among the results, the team found touch was just as beneficial for mental health as physical health – a finding that held for adults and newborns – although touch had a bigger impact on some areas than others.
“Our work illustrates that touch interventions are best suited for reducing pain, depression and anxiety in adults and children as well as for increasing weight gain in newborns,” the researchers write.
The analysis revealed humans gained similar benefits in terms of their physical health when touched by other humans as by objects – such as social robots or weighted blankets.
Hartmann said that was a surprise. “This means we need to undertake more research on the potential of weighted blankets or social robots to improve people’s wellbeing, especially during contact-limiting situations like the recent Covid-19 pandemic,” she said.
The positive impact on mental health was larger for human touch than touch from objects – possibly, the team said, because it involved skin-to-skin contact.
Among other results, the team found touch was beneficial for both healthy and unwell people, although the impact was larger among the latter for mental health benefits.
The type of touch and its duration was not important, although greater frequency was associated with greater benefits in adults.
Further, touching the head was associated with greater health benefits than touching other parts of the body.
The team cautioned that some of the findings could be false positives, while it was not clear if they would hold across different cultures.
Dr Mariana von Mohr, from Royal Holloway, University of London, who was not involved in the work, said if future robots could more accurately replicate the texture and warmth of human skin, they may be able to provide comparable mental health benefits to human touch.
“[These properties are] important because our skin contains specialised sensors, known as C-tactile afferents, which are particularly receptive to gentle, caressing touch and temperature similar to that of human skin, factors that are also thought to facilitate emotional regulation,” she said.
Prof Katerina Fotopoulou, at University College London, said the research gave a bird’s-eye view of the benefits of touch interventions on health.
She cautioned that the work could not offer more specific conclusions, such as the particular types of touch that may be associated with specific health benefits.
Dr Susannah Walker, at Liverpool John Moores University, agreed, noting that many of the studies considered were small and included varied types of touch and different measures of their outcomes. “This means it is hard to draw firm conclusions about why they work,” she said.
Fotopoulou added that the research could fuel new work in the field, including how touch could be used alongside other treatments.
“It is a historical misfortune that we have prioritised talking over touch or other somatic therapies in the past couple of centuries. This review gives us the necessary emphasis and confidence to redress this balance with further, careful study on touch interventions,” she said.