You may be the meanest wise guy in town who opens beer bottles with your teeth, but you still need hugs. However, hugs aren’t beneficial only for your emotional health, as science comes to shed some new light upon the mystery.
According to PsychologyToday.com, scientists have found four new aspects regarding hugging. We’ll gladly be presenting them below, along with manifesting our hopes that people will enjoy hugging each other more once the pandemic restrictions will pass.
1. Hugging reduces stress hormones
If you are getting hugged by others or even hugging yourself, you’re helping those levels of stress hormones to go down. The conclusion belongs to Aljoscha Dreisoerner from the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany), who has made a new study along with his team. They observed 159 volunteers by using the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). As expected, the volunteers got stressed during a fake job interview.
2. Hugging duration impacts the mood
One new study done by Anna L. Dueren from the University of London’s Department of Psychology shows that 45 women who hugged somebody went through more pleasant feelings during the hugs that lasted longer.
3. For older adults, hugs are related to health
A new study made by Tia Rogers-Jarrell from the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, which is located at York University in Toronto, Canada, shows another amazing aspect. More than 20,000 people were analyzed, and they were all at least 65 years old.
It was found that those individuals who were involved in hugs very often were more likely to go through higher self-rated health compared to those who said they never got the chance of having a hug.
4. Culture influences our hugs
After analyzing data from more than 14,000 folks from 45 countries, researchers led by Agnieszka Sorokowska from the University of Wroclaw (Poland) found that people were more or less affective to each other depending on what country or culture they come from. For instance, those from less religious and less conservative countries have shown more emotional interactions.
Perhaps nobody can deny that hugging the right person is one of the greatest feelings in the world, and science surely has more to discover about the mechanisms behind such a gesture.
