Comfort led for about one in three of 9,703 UK adults asked why a hug stayed with them

Comfort is the most common reason a hug stays in memory, a survey of 15,049 adults in the United Kingdom found. The study, published in PLOS One on October 28, 2026 and led by Anna Lena Dueren of the University of Bristol, puts understanding and support next. Nearly 70% of respondents said a hug had left a positive mark on them.

What earlier research had left open

Hugs have a research record of their own. The paper cites Affection Exchange Theory, which holds that humans have an innate need to share affection and differ in how they like to give and receive it. It notes that hugging has been linked to lower stress and better daily mood, and that earlier work found a stress-buffering effect of hugs in women that was absent in men.

What nobody had asked at this scale was why a particular hug sticks. The authors say the relationship between empathy and hugging had not, to their knowledge, been investigated. They add that how attachment style shapes views on hugging was unknown, although work on slower, caressing touch pointed to a pattern, with conflicting findings in some studies.

The authors had written their hypotheses down in advance. The pre-registration is public, and the paper lists its departures from it.

One yes-or-no question, asked before the lockdowns

The data come from the Touch Test, a public science project run by university researchers with BBC Radio 4 and the Wellcome Collection. Promotion on BBC programmes and other media drew more than 40,000 people to an online questionnaire about touch in early 2020, mostly before UK pandemic lockdowns. Fewer than 1% of responses arrived after social contact restrictions began on March 26, 2020, according to the StudyFinds write-up of the paper.

The team kept 15,049 adults with no reported disability or long-term health condition. They were aged 18 to 92, averaging 56, and three in four were women.

One question did most of the work: “Is there a hug that you remember because of its positive emotional effect on you?” Yes came from 10,457 people and no from 4,589, which gives the 69.5% reported in the paper's abstract.

Comfort first, then understanding, then support

Those who said yes picked a single best reason from a list. Of the 9,703 people who chose from it, 3,154 picked comfort, about one in three. Understanding came next with 2,783 and support with 1,939. Another 754 wrote in a reason of their own. Those answers were set aside.

The ordering matters less than its plainness. Nobody picked the grand gesture, because the list did not offer one. What people kept was the feeling of being steadied by someone who seemed to grasp what was going on.

The authors read this as consistent with data on hugs as stress-buffering social support. Earlier studies, they write, mostly tracked physiological markers such as heart rate, blood pressure and oxytocin levels, whereas this one rests on self-reports from a large adult sample.

It is a memory, set down years after the moment, and memory edits kindly.

Men and women gave somewhat different mixes. Roughly two-thirds of women chose comfort or understanding, against about half of men, and men were likelier to pick friendliness (12.3% against 4.8%). The researchers rated the overall gender link as small. They urged caution because far fewer men than women answered this question, 2,197 against 7,506.

Empathy, attachment and habit shaped who kept a hug

The second half of the paper asks who holds on to a warm hug at all. Adults who scored higher on both cognitive and emotional empathy, meaning understanding what others feel and feeling along with them, were likelier to recall one. Higher scores on a body-perception scale, which links body awareness to touch, pointed the same way. The authors call that measure preliminary.

Attachment, the way a person relates to those closest to them, pulled in opposite directions. People who tend to feel distress when facing separation were likelier to remember a hug. People who prize independence in relationships were less likely to, according to the Bristol team.

Habit counted, too. Adults who always greet friends and family with a hug were likelier to recall a meaningful one. Those who dislike being hugged, or struggle to judge how firmly to hug, were less likely.

How often someone received a hug or a kiss on a typical day made no difference. StudyFinds reads this as a hint that feelings about hugging matter more than sheer volume, which is a reading of the result and not a finding of the paper.

One expected link never showed. Adults whose parents tucked them in each night with a hug and a kiss were no likelier to recall a meaningful hug, contrary to what the researchers predicted. A single survey question measured it, and the authors treat the result as exploratory.

What the numbers can and cannot carry

Every effect in the paper is small. The design cannot show cause. The survey captures one moment, so it cannot say whether empathy makes hugs memorable or memorable hugs build empathy. Participants chose to take part in a survey about touch, so they may be keener on the subject than the average adult.

The sample was about 75% women and came only from the UK. Per the authors, the findings may not hold in societies with different attitudes to physical contact and interpersonal distance. The body-perception scale did not hold together fully statistically, and the emotional-empathy measure showed low internal consistency, so results built on either deserve a cautious reading.

The survey never asked who gave the hug or where it happened. Ask anyone about their best one, and that is where they would begin.

On funding, Michael J. Banissy was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wellcome Collection commissioned the Touch Test. A European Research Council award supported the time of co-author Aikaterini Fotopoulou. Banissy is also the author of a book on touch from a commercial publisher, which the authors say does not alter their adherence to PLOS One policies on sharing data and materials. The pre-registration, questionnaire and code are public on the Open Science Framework, so other researchers can rerun the analysis and test the small effects for themselves, with the survey's weaknesses in plain view.

The hormone behind the hug is harder to pin down

Coverage of the paper reached for oxytocin. Neuroscience News wrote that hugging stimulates the release of the hormone, but the survey itself measured no hormone: it asked people questions.

The nearest review is a June 24, 2026 article in Frontiers in Psychology by Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Maria Petersson of the Karolinska Institutet. They write that stroking or gentle touch of the skin brings psychological and physical benefits, including less fear, pain and stress, and they propose that oxytocin release carries part of the effect. The word is propose, and the review is a synthesis of earlier work, not a new trial.

It also flags a problem of measurement. The method used to analyse oxytocin in blood changes the results, and two common assays can give very different outcomes. A figure for oxytocin after a hug depends heavily on the laboratory method behind it.

The gap between the hormone story and the trial record is already visible in a Reflets brief on a 2025 trial of 96 couples in therapy, which found the hormone safe but no better than placebo. Touch from another creature shows a similar pattern: in an Innsbruck lab, 64 dog owners who petted their dogs for five minutes recovered no faster from a stress test, yet their brains and hearts reacted less to the second one.

What it means for readers in Britain and America

The paper cannot tell a reader whether to hug more. It does suggest that the useful question is not how many hugs a week, since daily frequency made no difference, but whether the person giving one is paying attention. Comfort and understanding, the two leading reasons, are both about being read correctly.

The sample is British. American readers should treat it as a UK result, and nothing more. The authors expect norms around touch to differ elsewhere.

The authors say a next step would be to look at how personality, previous experiences and the context of a hug shape its perception. In their words: “We hope our findings will help explain why hugs are perceived differently from person to person.” Until then, the best evidence says only that a remembered hug is mostly a remembered feeling of being understood.

Sources

• Why we hug: Individual differences predict emotional touch memories, PLOS One, Dueren et al., October 28, 2026
• Oxytocin release patterns and effects, with a focus on touch, social interaction, and closeness, Frontiers in Psychology, Uvnäs-Moberg and Petersson, June 24, 2026