Hand-Holding May Affect Your Brain

Feb. 14, 2006 — -- The power of hand-holding has long been enshrined in culture -- from The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," to the 1970 film, "Love Story," to famous works of art.

Now a new study -- to be published later this year in the journal Psychological Science -- purports to show that holding hands can have real physiological benefits.

Dr. Richard Davidson -- who runs a brain imaging lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison -- ran an ad in a local newspaper, recruiting 16 couples whom he identified as happily married.

It sounds a little cruel, but Davidson put the wives in an MRI machine and occasionally delivered mild electric shocks to their ankles.

He found that when the husbands reached in and held their wives' hands, the areas of their wives brains that register anxiety showed much less activity.

The wives who claimed to be the most happily married showed the most dramatic results.

"So the greater the intimacy in the relationship," said Davidson, "the more significant was the reduction of brain activity in areas of the brain that are association with threat, detection and with anxiety."

As brain images have become more advanced, there have been a flood of studies claiming to illustrate the physiological effects of everything from meditation to political partisanship to love.

There's debate in the scientific community about how valuable these studies really are. But Davidson -- who says he's been happily married for 28 years -- believes his study shows that affection among loving couples may actually change people's brains.

He says it could make people better able to handle stress, and therefore healthier -- a notion bolstered by studies showing social contact can boost people's immune systems.