What your hugs say about your relationships
When you go in for a hug with a loved one (or a not-so-loved one), chances are you aren’t thinking too much about it. It’s a sort of natural, automatic response, right? Well, it turns out your hugs actually say a lot about your relationship with the person you’re embracing.
A study has found that the side we lean to when hugging someone speaks volumes about how we feel towards them.
German researchers analysed more than 2,000 hugs in departures and arrivals at an airport and compared them to 500 embraces between strangers.
What they found was that during more intense, emotional hugs we lean to the left with our left arm reaching out first to our partner’s right arm, while in less emotionally-charged embraces we turn to the right, extending our right arm to our partner’s left arm.
“This is because of the influence of the right hemisphere, which controls the left side of the body and processes both positive and negative emotions,” lead author, Julian Packheiser of Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum, said.
“When people hug, emotional and motor networks in the brain interact and cause a stronger drift to the left in emotional contexts.”
However, the rules change when it comes to two men embracing. In this case, researchers noticed a strong inclination towards the typically more emotionally-charged left-side hugs even when in neutral situations.
“Our interpretation is that many men consider embraces between men to be something negative; therefore, they tend to perceive hugs as negative even in a neutral situation, such as saying hello,” the study’s co-author Sebastian Ocklenburg explained.
However, some are sceptical as to the accuracy of the study, which assumed that people hugging in airport departures were feeling negative emotions while those hugging in arrivals were experiencing positive emotions.
“I personally don’t buy that,” body language and communication expert Dr Lillian Glass told Newsweek. “When you hug someone there’s a great deal of various emotions that are involved. Also, most people are statistically right-handed, so you’re going to go to the right side.”
So, the next time you give someone a hug, try and notice which side you’re leaning towards and see if these findings apply to your relationships.
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