Article Summary:
A new report suggests that social touch is essential for mental well-being and can help in reducing stress and pain while facilitating bonding. A lack of such touch can lead to “skin hunger” resulting in an upsurge of mental health problems. A study conducted in 2021 showed that deprivation of intimate touch from close family and partners was associated with feelings of anxiety and loneliness. Social touch is so important that there are specific cells in our skin to detect it. The research reveals that physical touch from friends, acquaintances or colleagues does not have the same impact on mental health as that from family and partners.
Individual differences affect the need and craving for social touch, and Mariana von Mohr, a researcher specializing in social cognition at Royal Holloway University of London, says people might prefer to connect in different ways. However, in general, intimate touch between loved ones is important for emotional regulation and social buffering, where being together with others helps us handle and recover from stress. Social touch causes the release of the social-bonding hormone oxytocin in the brain, which is believed to reduce anxiety and pain.
Studies have found that touch enhances intimacy between couples, and the release of oxytocin in the brain is thought to be the cause of this. Another research showed that 84 adult women who received slow, affective touch from an experimenter after being excluded in an online ball-tossing game felt less socially excluded. Mammals have C-tactile fibers, and these sensory cells are evolutionarily conserved and essential. These cells, and the ability to detect social touch, may be key for making the touch of a loved one feel good, which in turn helps bond us.
A new study shows that directly stimulating neurons in mice – similar to C-tactile fibers in humans – can release dopamine, a neurochemical associated with reward, in their brains. These Mrgprb4 neurons are necessary for female mice to be receptive to sexual advances from male mice. Researchers activated the Mrgprb4 sensory cells using optogenetics, which is a neuroscience technique that allows researchers to manipulate the activities of specific neurons by shining a light on them. The researchers found that stimulating these sensory neurons and engaging in sexual behavior both released dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a key brain area associated with reward.