Carnegie Mellon University
January 31, 2015

Can hugs make you healthier?

By Steve Casner

Can hugs make you healthier?

Even though it’s February, I’m not sick. How does that work? Some new research from Carnegie Mellon University might give us some clues. In their most recent study, Cohen and colleagues used questionnaires to assess how socially supported each of their 406 study volunteers felt, and used daily telephone interviews to tally up the interpersonal conflicts that had happened that day. The researchers recorded one more thing that hadn’t been studied before: the number of hugs each volunteer had received. MORE