Studies in this field, exploring the nature of 'touch hunger' or 'touch deprivation,' had previously focused on isolated older adults, but after COVID-19, they expanded to cover all age groups.
This included a population normally considered to be the least vulnerable to touch deprivation: the young.
The findings were revealing – it turned out that a prolonged lack of touch, in some cases for over two years, had significantly affected the ability of today’s teenagers and young adults to connect with their peers.
According to Dr Katalin Gothard, a professor of physiology and neurology at the University of Arizona, in the US, we’ve often underestimated the extent to which social bonds are forged through physical closeness and touch-mediated interactions during childhood and adolescence.
“Those deprived of these experiences appear to have paid a long-term price,” she says.
Gothard notes that she has also seen this first-hand, through observing the behaviour of undergraduate students as part of her role as a faculty member.
Students who experienced some degree of teenage socialising before the pandemic tend to differ noticeably from those who spent a sizeable chunk of their formative years in lockdown.
“These differences extend beyond academic performance,” she says.
“Isolated students are less inclined to work collaboratively, less likely to form friendships through shared activities and less likely to engage in small, but meaningful gestures of touch, such as a reassuring pat on the back or a celebratory high-five.”
What touch says
The importance of touch in social development perhaps isn’t surprising when you consider how modern humans evolved. Anthropologists now believe that Homo sapiens rose to become the dominant species through our nature as an intensely social species.
Rather than being shaped by conflict and competition, our success was fuelled by complex networks of caregiving, cooperation, shared labour and collective problem-solving.
As pointed out by James Coan, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia, in the US, touch played an essential role in all this.
Meaning, the human brain and body developed to expect the presence of other people and physical contact with them. When this expectation goes unfulfilled, the body mounts a stress response.
“Touch matters a lot because it’s one of the simplest and most efficient ways of signalling that social support is available,” says Coan.
“It can communicate safety and emotional regulation. Basically, touch isn’t just a nice-to-have aspect of being human, but a key part of how we regulate ourselves and our social lives, from our first to possibly our last moments.”
Numerous studies have indicated the importance of touch for our wellbeing.
Neonatal nurses have long known that skin-on-skin contact within the first hour after birth is fundamental for the health of newborn babies, while throughout infancy, touch remains crucial for growth, immune system development and even survival.
More recently, scientists have learnt that touch can help buffer both physical and emotional pain, which is perhaps why we instinctively hold a person’s hand when delivering difficult news, offering emotional support or during a painful medical procedure.
Touch can even make people more amenable – psychologists have found that when requesting a co-worker’s help, they’re more likely to assist if you graze them gently on the back or shoulder when asking.
Conversely, when touch is removed from our lives, it can have all kinds of dire repercussions, as seen through the effects of lockdown on children and adolescents around the world.
Psychologists have developed a Touch Deprivation Scale to measure how much touch we’re getting in our lives, with higher scores on this scale (indicating receiving less touch than the average person) found to be strongly associated with anxiety and depression.
“Touch matters tremendously to everyone,” says Coan.
“Children need it, but so do friends, romantic partners and co-workers. When touch opportunities decrease, as happens so often in bereavement, illness or other forms of social isolation, people become undernourished in a pretty literal sense.”
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Wired for touch
Given its importance in the story of human evolution, it’s perhaps not surprising that there’s a rich, underlying biology that explains our innate need for physical contact.
When a baby receives a hug or a gentle stroke from its parents, this activates a set of highly specialised nerves in the skin known as C-tactile fibers.
When activated, these fibers send signals to the brain that trigger the release of oxytocin, aka the ‘cuddle’ hormone, from the hypothalamus.
C-tactile fibers behave in a very similar way when we get consensual touch as an adult, triggering the release of oxytocin in both the person being touched and the person doing the touching.
Oxytocin has far-reaching effects throughout the body. It induces relaxation along with feelings of comfort, safety and affection. It also lowers the heart rate, reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol and promotes bonding.
It’s thought to be one of the reasons why people who receive higher levels of affectionate touch from friends, family and their partners are less likely to suffer from chronic inflammation, a risk factor for numerous diseases.
Patricia Thomas, an associate professor of sociology at Purdue University, Indiana, in the US, says that this likely explains one of the key findings from the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
The study, which has been following more than 700 people since 1938, found that people in happy, supportive relationships are more likely to live longer and healthier lives.
“I think of affectionate touch as a type of social support, which can reduce the impact of stress on health,” says Thomas.
“One of the hallmarks of happy relationships is that social support is given and received, which benefits health and longevity. So, I think it’s likely that touch might explain part of the finding that people in happy relationships tend to live longer.”
Touch has also been shown to improve heart-rate variability – the natural, millisecond-by-millisecond variation in the time between your heartbeats – a biomarker that’s thought to be a key indicator of the health of your nervous system.
A higher heart-rate variability indicates greater resilience to stress, something that can be improved through being exposed to more touch.
This is because activating C-tactile fibers helps stimulate and tone the responsiveness of the vagus nerve, the nervous system’s superhighway, which links the brain and major organ systems.
Consensual touch can also play a role in regulating our emotions.
This is partly due to the importance of good nervous system regulation for overall emotional wellbeing, but also because touch can actually promote calm through slowing the activity of the amygdala, an almond-shaped region in the base of the brain, which processes emotions.
Gothard has directly observed the effect of touch on the amygdala by monitoring patterns of brain activity in troops of monkeys undergoing grooming, a behaviour that seemed to initiate a transcendent state of pleasure.
While the amygdala typically tracks outside events and the body’s internal environment with a heightened sensitivity, this all dissipated during grooming.
“The monkeys relaxed, closed their eyes and sank into a state of bliss,” Gothard recalled.
“In over 30 years, I’ve never seen a single stimulus capable of so profoundly dampening neural responsiveness in the amygdala. It appeared that the animals effectively disengaged from the outside world.”
It was such a dramatic change that Gothard has since speculated that touch interventions may represent a new solution for a range of mental health conditions, from anxiety to PTSD.
These conditions are often characterised by an overactive amygdala, which creates a state of heightened vigilance within the body.
“Pleasant touch, particularly from a trusted social partner, appears to suspend this state of preparedness, because in that context, such vigilance is unnecessary,” she says.
But, while the desire for touch is hardwired within all of us, it isn’t a licence to invade someone’s personal space.
Gothard notes that touch doesn’t affect everyone in the same way – it can be comforting for some and distressing for others. This is because responses to touch are shaped by culture, personal history and life experience.
People who have undergone traumas or abuse, for example, are likely to react to touch in markedly different ways.
“For some people, touch is like an acquired taste; it becomes acceptable and even enjoyable over time, while others would rather have a bucket of cold water poured over their head than accept a hug,” Gothard says.
But we also know that for many people, being deprived of touch for years or even decades through social isolation can be deeply damaging.
“If touch is wanted but not received, we have a state similar to loneliness where social contact needs are not met,” says Dr Julian Packheiser, a researcher in social neuroscience at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany.
Because of this, scientists are now investigating how touch could be used as an intervention to improve people’s health, wellbeing and, ultimately, their lives.
Give yourself a hug
It may sound corny, but if you’re feeling isolated or disconnected from the world, giving yourself a hug, or even imagining the sensation of a hug, could genuinely help.
This sort of thing is becoming increasingly important. While we’re more connected than ever, thanks to digital platforms and social media, paradoxically, we’re also lonelier than we’ve ever been.
Research carried out around the world indicates that the number of single people living alone is rising. In the UK, for example, single people now comprise nearly 30 per cent of all households.
Some scientists are concerned that this might translate to accelerated ageing and a greater risk of chronic illnesses. “Social disconnection and loneliness are associated with worse cardiovascular and inflammatory outcomes, poorer sleep and greater health risk in later life,” says Coan.
In light of this, a flurry of ideas has been generated for how to assist the touch deprived.
Visualising supportive touch from a partner has been shown to elicit some of the same benefits in suppressing stress responses and dampening activity in the amygdala in the same way that real touch would.
Likewise, other studies have shown that sleeping with a weighted blanket or stroking a pet can replicate some of the calming sensations of consensual touch from another person.
It also appears that touch could play a beneficial role in medical and care settings. There’s ample research showing that handholding and other forms of supportive touch in hospitals or care homes can help calm distressed patients, as well as reduce the need for sedatives and other forms of pain management.
“There have been studies showing that physical touch from nurses has been linked to patients’ improved sleep, lower blood pressure and lower levels of pain,” says Thomas.
He says that for older adults in long-term care, it’s important to educate both nursing staff and visiting friends and family on how touch – handholding, hugging, or even touching a person’s shoulder – can improve that person’s happiness and wellbeing.
Similarly, Coan is now a strong proponent for affectionate touch, when welcomed, in dementia care settings.
Some research has even investigated whether offering brief massages to care home residents could yield health benefits, although not all scientists are convinced this is necessary.
“Our findings have shown that extensive massages of more than 10 minutes are not needed,” says Packheiser. “Short hugs can be helpful to the same extent as a long massage.”
Touch can also have a remarkably powerful effect for those at the very end of life. Not only can it help diminish anxiety about the prospect of dying, touch can also convey a sense of peace, even if the person being touched is no longer capable of responding to those around them.
“Touch is the last sense that leaves us,” says Gothard.
“The brain may no longer process what we hear and what we see, but the skin still transmits signals of presence and love. Holding the hand of a dying person is no different from holding the hand of a child in the dentist’s chair or a woman in labour.”
It all shows that, from birth until death, humans are hardwired to be soothed and reassured by physical contact. In a fragmenting world where social contact is ever more fleeting, we could all benefit from more touch.
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