포옹의 과학 (원제; How to hug, according to science)

요약:

 

In total, the results suggest the safest, most likely to be pleasant hug is one that’s 5 to 10 seconds long with crisscrossed arms. Good luck out there, humans!

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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.

(Although a laboratory setting may not seem like the best way to study an intimate cultural tradition, the idea was to compare duration and hug style in the most controlled way possible. Ideally, the study would have included men and women on both ends of the hug, but Anna Düren, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London and the study’s first author, says the COVID-19 pandemic began before she and her colleagues could collect those data in follow-up studies.)

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, hug style made little to no difference, the team reports this month in Acta Psychologica.

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. She thinks that over time, the participants may have gotten used to receiving hugs from a stranger while blindfolded. As they acclimated, perhaps some of the weirdness wore off.

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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.

A crisscross hug on the left and neck-waist on the rightA. L. DUEREN, ET AL., ACTA PSYCHOLOGICA (2021) 10.1016/J.ACTPSY.2021.103441

Another factor the study didn’t address is pressure. How hard or soft should you squeeze? Packheiser suspects the intimacy of the huggers’ relationship plays a role. “If it’s a romantic thing, [pressure] can be much more than if it’s a casual thing,” he says.

The second phase of the experiment took place in the real world. The researchers recruited 100 pairs of students observed socializing on campus to hug in public. The team gathered data on gender, height, and how emotionally close the pairs rated themselves.

Without prompting the students on how to hug, the researchers found the crisscross style was more common, accounting for 66 out of 100 hugs. The preference for crisscross was especially prevalent in pairs of men, with 82% of 28 observed pairs opting for the style. Neither emotional closeness nor height had significant effects on the style of hugging; however, the researchers note that most participants were relatively close in height, and they guess that neck-waist might be more common when heights differ more drastically.

Packheiser appreciates this second phase of the study: “The really nice thing is that they validated it in real life.”

Düren says the male-male preference for crisscross hugs was especially interesting because previous work has indicated people feel more egalitarian about this style of hugging. The crisscross, she says, might convey closeness without adding romantic subtext.

Düren says she thinks the trend might have something to do with men being concerned about conveying romantic signals to their hugging partner or onlookers. “When we did this second study, we talked to people,” she says. “They’d often say ‘Oh yeah, the neck-waist feels a bit more intimate.’”

In total, the results suggest the safest, most likely to be pleasant hug is one that’s 5 to 10 seconds long with crisscrossed arms. Good luck out there, humans!

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doi: 10.1126/science.acx9683