If you're feeling a little out of practice after a few years of avoiding physical touch, you'd be forgiven. The study will help identify the perfect hug.
People tend to get the most pleasure from hugs that last for five or more seconds.
We give hugs in a criss-cross fashion, where one arm goes over another's shoulder, while the other arm goes under their shoulder. This is not the same as a neck-waist hug, where one person hugs the neck and the other hugs the waist.
In the lab, hugs given by a female experimenter were deemed pleasant by 47 female participants. One-second hugs were the least pleasurable, while 5- and 10-second hugs were equally enjoyable.
The authors of the study were surprised by the results and think their participants grew accustomed to the longer hugs.
One participant wrote in her feedback that she felt better every time she said something. Another person requested to leave the study.
The researchers advise people to stick to five seconds because there is some evidence that a hug lasts three seconds in the real world.
The authors conclude that long hugs are more pleasant than short hugs and criss-cross hugs are more common than neck-waist hugs.
It's not yet clear if the preference for longer hugs exists across genders, because the lab experiment was interrupted by the Pandemic.
The hugging style seems to vary depending on who is giving and receiving the touch. There were notable differences between male and female participants when researchers randomly selected 206 people to give each other a hug.
The 'criss-cross' hug was used most often when it was between two males. Men gave criss-cross hugs at a higher rate than women. Female participants appeared more willing to go for the neck-waist hug when hugging other females or males.
The research from 1995 found that male-male hugs are done differently than female-female hugs.
The authors of the current study suggest that when men hug it could be a way to express recognition of equality. Women might hug for different reasons.
These are just hypotheses. The current research can only tell us so much since it was conducted in one culture and among a relatively young age group. The lab experiments were conducted among only females and didn't control for hugging pressure.
There are many questions to be answered about how humans hug.
In a real world experiment, height differences didn't affect whether someone gave a neck-waist hug. A criss-cross style of hug can be more difficult if the height difference is large. The researchers saw a 20 centimeters gap in height.
The neck-waist hug was more romantic than the criss-cross hug, but the findings didn't show this style occurring more often when the two huggers were emotionally close.
There's still a lot we don't know about hugs.
"We anticipate that the studies presented here will provide a foundation for future research on pleasant touch, especially for research on hugs, which are highly prevalent but still widely under studied," the authors conclude.
The study was published in a journal.
