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There’s a group within the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine called the Touch Research Institute.
This wing of the school focuses on studying the effects of touch on human beings, from infants to senior citizens, and was started with a grant from Johnson & Johnson.
The premise of much of their work is that touch—contact between one human being and another human being—is not just sometimes pleasant, but actually has measurable health benefits. And research beginning in 1982 that continues today has shown that what’s sometimes categorized as “touch therapy” can facilitate weight gain in premies, help alleviate symptoms of depression, reduce pain, including chronic pain, reduce the production of stress hormones, and even improve our immune system function.
Part of their research was predicated on the tough-to-measure, but historically and at times clinically significant effects of things like massage therapy and yoga—most of which have some physical component, causing us to intimately engage with our own bodies, but which are also often reinforced by psychological benefits, and contact with instructors and fellow students.
It’s important to note that there’s a lot of scientifically unsupported work in touch therapy-ish fields, especially those that delve into vaguely defined “energy work” and what’s sometimes called “therapeutic touch”—which, strangely, often involves no touching at all, but instead the claimed (and scientifically unsupported) manipulation of energy fields using mystic powers.
There’s zero evidence for the efficacy of any of these non-touch methods, aside from the very real placebo effect found in many varieties of non-treatment treatments. But the ones that involved physical contact may also benefit from our latent biological response to being touched by a fellow human being, especially when they’re conducted in a comfortable, healthy-feeling context.
There’s long been evidence that babies who lack physical contact early on have vastly different hormonal systems than their peers who have had regular physical contact, though much of this research was only conducted in retrospect, due to neglectful conditions in orphanages in Romania (other places, too, but much of the original research in this space was conducted there because of existing conditions that would not be ethical to recreate for research purposes).
Subsequent research has indicated that the diminished production of chemicals associated with social bonding—especially oxytocin and vasopressin—found in people who were physically neglected as children may last for their entire lives; though of course, that’s difficult to know for certain, as there are countless variables that effect such things, and the number of subjects in these tests is too small to draw broad, absolute conclusions.
There’s evidence that the effects of physical bonding extend far beyond our infant years, though, and don’t only apply to babies and their parents. Humans of all ages can benefit from a wide variety of health benefits derived from the right kind of touch in the right context.
From a research paper based on a project that looked into the existing evidence of touch-related biological responses in humans, entitled Touch for socioemotional and physical well-being: A review:
“MRI data are reviewed showing activation of the orbitofrontal cortex and the caudate cortex during affective touch. Physiological and biochemical effects of touch are also reviewed including decreased heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol and increased oxytocin. Similar changes noted following moderate pressure massage appear to be mediated by the stimulation of pressure receptors and increased vagal activity. Increased serotonin and decreased substance P may explain its pain-alleviating effects. Positive shifts in frontal EEG also accompany moderate pressure massage along with increased attentiveness, decreased depression and enhanced immune function including increased natural killer cells, making massage therapy one of the most effective forms of touch.”
In essence, there are measurable health benefits to physical contact with other human beings, and our bodies seem primed to distinguish between contact with another human and contact with something meant to replicate the sensation of being touched by another human (like sitting in a massage chair compared to getting a similar massage from a massage therapist).
Part of the rationale here is that aspects of our immune system seem to be jolted into action by human contact, and we may be more capable of dealing with things like pain and stress when we experience such contact, as well.
A research project (which seems ethically questionable to me) in which people were provided with different quantities of hugs and different amounts of implied social support, before being exposed to a cold-causing virus, demonstrated statistically significant evidence that hugs and perceived community may help us avoid succumbing to the worst of such illnesses.
That said, there’s also evidence that the context of a touch might matter as much as the touch, itself.
Research published in 2015 indicated that who is doing the touching, where, and in what situation and environment, likely plays a significant role in what benefits are derived from it—and whether those touches, in some cases, could instead have the opposite effect.
Which isn’t terribly surprising if you think about it on the non-research level: someone touching you when you don’t want to be touched, a stranger touching you without permission, someone touching you with intentions that you don’t share—these are all potentially quite questionable and even scarring interactions, and it superficially makes sense that such experiences would be stressful, not stress-reducing. But it’s useful to have research backing up that supposition, in case our biologies turned out to be misaligned with our conscious experiences of such things, for some reason.
There’s a casual term often used in pop-psychology writing to describe the confluence of negative effects we can experience when physical, human contact is unavailable: skin hunger.
The potential for cannibalism-related misunderstandings aside, this term fairly well captures the experience of lacking contact for long periods of time, for many people.
Touch helps us regulate so many stability-focused internal processes that we can begin to feel unbalanced, not just lonely, when isolated in this way.
There are social side-effects of not touching another human being for periods of time, in other words, but there are also psychological and biological impacts, most of which cause us to feel alienated, stressed, depressed, and potentially more prone to sickness and heart-related conditions like high blood pressure.
Like anything biological or brain-related, this is a spectrum, and there are people who will operate opposite to what’s been captured by research data, thus far.
Some people will be truly averse to being touched in most or any contexts, and that’s just as normal and okay—and perhaps even beneficial at times, like when significant portions of the human population are under pandemic-related lockdown.
It’s possible, some research suggests, to replicate some of these benefits using non-physical means: having a conversation on the phone or via video chat, writing letters, engaging with other human beings in deeply personal, non-physical ways, or even just having casual and superficial, but reliable and comfortable interactions on a daily basis. These have all been shown, in some contexts, to boost feelings of connectivity and lower stress, potentially because they imply social support and connection.
The numbers involved are less solid and the impact less defined, compared to when these communication methods are melded with positive physical contact, but they’re certainly better than nothing.
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