Touch is an important communication tool in interpersonal relationships, whether intimate or professional. Studies have shown that pleasant touch, like you’d get from a cuddle, hug, or holding hands, improves mood, reduces stress and strengthens relationships. But what makes a touch pleasant?
In a new study, researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, and the Dresden University of Technology have discovered what enhances the pleasantness of touch: giving people a choice.
“It seems the simple act of choosing enhances how our body and mind respond to intimate contact,” said Lenka Gorman, a doctoral candidate from the Cognition, Values, Behavior Lab at LMU and the study’s lead and corresponding author.
It’s common sense that we value something more when we choose it than when it’s forced upon us (studies confirm this). Neuroscientists have found that actively choosing heightens activity in an area of the brain associated with reward and increases the release of dopamine, the feel-good hormone that motivates us to do something when we feel pleasure from things like food, drink, sex, drugs, and social interaction.
In the current study, the researchers examined how the perception of touch pleasantness was affected by choice by measuring both subjective and physiological responses. Twenty-three healthy volunteers, comprised of five women and 18 men aged between 18 and 35, were recruited.
For each stage of the experiment, participants either made a choice or the choice was made for them. The choice was relevant to the participant’s experience of being touched by the experimenter (high relevance), or it wasn’t (low relevance). Specifically, participants chose whether they wanted to be touched on their upper or lower arm (high relevance) or whether the toucher’s latex glove was blue or white (low relevance).
So, in a high-relevance test, participants either chose or were told where on the arm they would be touched, while the glove color was predetermined (white). Conversely, in a low-relevance test, participants chose or were told the color glove that’d be worn by the experimenter, while the touch site was predetermined (lower arm). This approach allowed the researchers to investigate the impact of choice on specific aspects of the touch experience.
Participants could only see the toucher’s hand (the rest of their body was obscured by a curtain) and were asked to rate the pleasantness of each touch on a scale from one (very unpleasant) to seven (very pleasant).
The researchers found that participants rated the touch as more pleasant when given a choice. There was a clear association between choice and relevance. While choosing where they wanted to be touched (the high-relevance test) significantly increased a participant’s perceived pleasantness, even the seemingly inconsequential choice of glove color also had a positive effect, albeit to a smaller extent.
“Choice and consent are ethical concerns; they’re also fundamental to how we experience things,” said Ophelia Deroy, chair of LMU’s Philosophy of Mind and one of the study’s senior authors. “We know that choosing taps into the same dopamine system as money, food, sex, and other rewards we actively seek. However, our research also found that even minor choices, like picking a color, can make people more open to an experience.”
The study’s findings provide fresh insight into how choice influences our experience of touch. In the medical setting, where therapeutic touch is commonly used, giving patients a choice may enhance the benefits. More broadly, the findings have implications for our well-being, communication, and interpersonal relationships.
The study was published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics.
Source: LMU
