The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that constant hugging has the ability to reduce susceptibility to infections associated with stress, as well as the severity of symptoms if you caught a cold or flu while giving social or emotional support to another.
The study surveyed 404 healthy adults asking them how often they experienced interpersonal conflicts, followed by how often they received hugs. The researchers were able to develop levels of social support based on the participants data. With this base line of data established, the researchers exposed the participants to a common cold virus and observed them for symptoms.
“We know that people experiencing ongoing conflicts with others are less able to fight off cold viruses,” Sheldon Cohen, lead author of the study, explained in a release. “We tested whether perceptions of social support are … effective in protecting us from stress-induced susceptibility to infection.”
The social support was able to reduce a participant’s risk of becoming infection, along with helping those who were infected experience less severe symptoms.
Cohen continued by saying that the results, “suggest that being hugged by a trusted person may act as an effective means of conveying support and that increasing the frequency of hugs might be an effective means of reducing the deleterious effects of stress.”
However, before you go out and start hugging all your friends and family infected with a cold or flu, the study was not able to clarify if the reduced risk of infection was a result of the actual act of hugging, or merely the intimacy and support that would be associated with hugging.
Either way, it’s a sweet relief to learn that a simple embrace may aid in combating the common cold.
Here at Phenomenex, a few of us weren’t lucky enough to avoid the season of stuffed up noses. So while it was abundant in the office, we decided to analyze a common cold medication in the lab. The current range of compounds aimed at the treatment of the common cold is quite large and comprise of ingredients from a variety of chemical characteristics. This is the direct result of a diverse array of pharmaceutical formulations that contain more than one active ingredient and target multiple symptoms at once.
With such a mixture of polar compounds, resolution, sensitivity, and speed are all important parameters. By using a high performance core-shell Kinetex 2.6 µm EVO C18 column we were able to achieve comprehensive resolution, narrow peak shapes, and a rapid analysis time. This ingredient screen can easily be used as a starting point for individual formulations as well as transferred between R&D and QC instrumentation due to the direct scalability of all three Kinetex EVO C18 particle sizes (1.7 µm, 2.6 µm, 5 µm).