Touch me!

Humans need touch. Children cannot develop healthily without physical contact. But even in adulthood, touch is important for social interaction. However, while the digitalization of society is increasing, the frequency of interpersonal contact is steadily decreasing. Instead of greeting each other with a handshake, for example, people get together in online meetings or communicate via chat.

“More and more contacts are shifting to the virtual world. This is not without consequences,” says Prof. Dr Ilona Croy from Friedrich Schiller University Jena. “More impersonal interaction leads to a reduction in trust and an increase in stress in interpersonal relationships,” says the Professor of Clinical Psychology. In order to mitigate the impending crisis, a clear understanding of the underlying psychosocial processes is needed. However, the field of interpersonal touch research is currently a patchwork quilt, and, above all, there is a lack of robust, experimental data.

Ilona Croy now wants to tackle this problem with several large-scale studies. The psychologist has been awarded a prestigious “Consolidator Grant” from the European Research Council (ERC). Over the next five years, she will receive almost two million euros in funding for the “TOUCHNET” project, as the ERC announced today.

Database on touch in everyday life

One aim of “TOUCHNET” is to build up a database on interpersonal touch behaviour in everyday life. “We already know from laboratory studies that physical contact reduces stress hormones, can lower the heart rate and alleviates anxiety,” says Croy. However, it is still unclear how this works in everyday life. The Jena psychologist names some of the questions she wants to answer: “How often does touching occur, under what conditions does it have to take place in order to have an effect?” To this end, she will conduct an “Ecological Momentary Assessment” of more than 100,000 everyday touch events and link these to social and health factors.

How touch synchronizes people emotionally

Building on this, “TOUCHNET” is pursuing a further goal: Ilona Croy and her research team will use the new database to investigate the mechanisms by which touch has an effect. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will be used to visualize the neuronal signatures of test subjects that occur during the perception and processing of touch stimuli and are associated with social processing and stress reduction. The researchers also want to use so-called “hyperscanning” to analyse how people who communicate with each other non-verbally via touch synchronize their neuronal processes.

The research project will cumulate into an overarching theory of touch perception that can contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between touch, social interaction and stress reduction.