The comfort in touch: Immediate and lasting effects of handholding on emotional pain

Abstract

Consoling touch is a powerful form of social support that has been repeatedly demonstrated to reduce the experience of physical pain. However, it remains unknown whether touch reduces emotional pain in the same way that it reduces physical pain. The present research sought to understand how handholding with a romantic partner shapes experiences of emotional pain and comfort during emotional recollection, as well as how it shapes lasting emotional pain associated with emotional experiences. Participants recalled emotionally painful memories or neutral memories with their partners, while holding their partner’s hand or holding a squeeze-ball. They additionally completed a follow-up survey to report how much emotional pain they associated with the emotional experiences after recalling them in the lab with their partners. Although consoling touch did not reduce emotional pain during the task, consoling touch increased feelings of comfort. Moreover, participants later recalled emotional memories that were paired with touch as being less emotionally painful than those that were not paired with touch. These findings suggest that touch does not decrease the immediate experience of emotional pain and may instead support adaptive processing of emotional experiences over time.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand: Handholding is Subjectively Preferred to Stroking in Acute Emotion Regulation

“…Second, the emotional regulation effects of handholding may be the result of top-down processes, with handholding bringing forward the representation of the inter-personal connection with the hand holder. Indeed, studies of emotional regulation through handholding have shown that participants' relationship satisfaction moderated the effects of handholding -participants with more satisfying relationships had stronger emotion regulation effects (Coan et al, 2006;Sahi et al, 2021). This suggests that the effect is not only a direct effect of touching, but also involves memories and other internal representations of the relationship.…”

“…Handholding in particular has received much research attention and has been found to have a variety of emotional regulation effects. Studies have found that handholding can reduce pain (Goldstein et al, 2018), reduce anxiety before surgery (Sriramka et al, 2021), and can lessen emotional pain while recalling negative emotional experiences (Sahi et al, 2021).…”

The analgesic power of pleasant touch in individuals with chronic pain: Recent findings and new insights

“…Even in adult life, as postulated by Morrison (2016) , pleasant touch can serve as an important stress buffer, as it might promote bodily allostasis by activating some of the key brain nodes involved in stress regulation. Finally, pleasant touch has recently been shown to improve wellbeing during stressful situations such as COVID ( Von Mohr et al, 2021 ), emotional pain ( Sahi et al, 2021 ), and physiological stress ( Triscoli et al, 2017 ).…”

Social relationships and relational pain in brain tumor patients and their partners

“…Patients rely heavily on these caregivers for support. Contact with a loved one has been shown to reliably reduce the experience of physical pain and has also been shown to enhance experiencing comfort from their partner during emotionally painful conversations, and to support subsequent adaptive processing of emotional pain ( 23 ). Relationship satisfaction in this study moderated the impact of contact on the experience of comfort ( 23 ), so the quality of relationships may be a significant factor in the impact of caregiver support.…”