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According to clinical lore, teenage girls with borderline traits need lots of hugs for reassurance, and they bring pillows and teddy bears along on overnight trips, basically as tactile transitional objects. Investigators in the Netherlands studied relationships between psychological traits and the impact of touch on the experience of “death anxiety” in several studies involving paid student volunteers in their early 20s.
In one study (N=61), a 1-second touch on the back by the female experimenter administering the questionnaires substantially reduced self-ratings of death anxiety among individuals with low self-esteem. Another study (N=120) repeated this experiment with similar results. The subjects then completed a distractor task, followe…