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I Wanna Hold Your Hand: Handholding is Subjectively Preferred to Stroking in Everyday Situations

Social touch is an important form of interpersonal emotion regulation. Two types of touch, C-touch (Slow stroking of skin with C-tactile afferents, such as the forearm) and handholding, have been extensively studied in the context of comforting touch. C-touch has been found to activate unique neural pathways associated with reward signaling, which suggests that it may be a preferable emotion regulation strategy. Notwithstanding, handholding is widely utilized in people’s everyday lives when seeking to regulate another person’s emotions. Here we sought to directly compare participants’ subjective preferences of touch type, in three studies. The studies involved participants imagining themselves in various positive and negative, physical and emotional situations and rating which type of touch (handholding, stroking, no touch) they would prefer. Study 1 (N=99) examined preferred type of touch to receive; Study 2 (N=101) examined touch reception and provision; and Study 3 (N=51) examined touch reception during injections (e.g., vaccine provision) in participants with blood\injection phobia. In all studies, participants preferred handholding over stroking, especially in intense situations. We propose that this preference, despite the unique neural pathways activated by slow stroking, might be due to handholding’s cultural ubiquity, due to it activating top-down regulation processes, or due to it inducing interpersonal synchrony.