New research suggests that physical touch, such as holding hands, could be helpful in reducing pain, most notably when it’s two people in a relationship, according to researchers from the University of Haifa in Israel, who presented their findings last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. “We all know that hand-holding is important for social support, but here we show the brain mechanism for this effect,” Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a psychology professor at the University of Haifa told Medium. “We show for the first time that brain waves are synchronized during hand-holding, and this support is effective at pain reduction.” Still, don’t expect to be hugging your pain away any time soon. Juulia Suvilehto, a researcher at the Linköping University in Sweden, who was not involved in the research, told Medium that she’s skeptical that a little hand hugging will do you any good — it’s probably correlational rather than causational.
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