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Dr. James Coan, the leader of the limited study involving 16 couples in marriages judged to be strong, said he was taken aback by the effect this simple gesture had on the stress levels of the women.
“We’ve known for decade that being in a good, committed relationship makes wounds heal faster, makes you sick less often and even live longer,” Coan said. “But the main point of this study is that no one had been able to quantify the mental benefits of a close relationship in terms of improved health.”
Coan, whose study entitled “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat”, is published in the December 2006 issue of the journal Psychological Science. The experiment focused on the brain wave patterns of the sixteen wives, who were confronted with the threat of electric shock while either holding their husband’s hand, the hand of an anonymous male, or no hand.
Coan and his colleagues used a brain scan, called functional magnetic resonance imaging, that was able to show how these women’s brains responded to the touch of their husband, or a stranger, or no comforting touch at all, while being face with a threatening situation.
The same effects on men were not studied during this trial, however researchers hope to conduct a study for males in the near future.
The study only involved happily married couples, who had the state of their relationships assessed before being allowed to participate. The women who were in the happiest marriages, based on the initiation assessment, recorded the biggest impact on stress levels during the hand-holding exercise.
All potential couples were recruited from the Madison, Wisconsin area, and a number were rejected because their marriages were deemed unhealthy or unfit for the experiment.
Coan said he planned to expand the horizon of his work next year with a new research project to include less happy couples, as well as gay and lesbian couples.
“We expect people in relationships that are not as strong will not get the same benefits from hand holding but we do not know to what extent,” said Coan, an assistant professor in the U.Va. Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Department of Psychology.
“What this does show though is that we are designed to depend on other people,” he concluded.
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