'Listening touch' can help couples' health

Warm but nonsexual touch may help couples reduce blood pressure and tension, according to a joint BYU and University of Utah study that's being published later this month. It found that men, in particular, benefit.

"Given that we do know social relations can influence health for good or bad, this is something that really shows we may be able to do things that can have a positive impact that basically involved no cost, no medication, it's easy, you can do it at home and it's the type of intervention that might be an effective tool," said lead investigator Julianne Holt-Lunstad, assistant professor of psychology at Brigham Young University.

Twenty couples were taught "listening touch," a form of neck, shoulder and head massage aimed at calming and connecting people, according Holt-Lunstad. They then practiced massaging their spouse three times a week for 30 minutes. In the second week, they learned couples massage. Halfway through each massage session, the partners switched who was massaging. After each session, they also sent in logs rating how relaxed they felt from the massage.

The control group — 14 couples — just went about their lives as they normally would.

All 68 individuals were initially assessed with portable blood pressure monitors for 24 hours and each answered questions about how often they expressed physical affection, such as by holding hands or kissing. The intervention lasted for four weeks, four couples at a time.

The researchers limited the study to couples who had been married at least six months. Because they were also looking for couples who were not on any medications (which could affect the hormone levels that were being measured), they ended up with a young sample, Holt-Lunstad said, all recruited from the Provo-Orem area.

The study was limited to nonsexual touch to avoid a potential source of tension between couples, Holt-Lunstad said.

They found that the couples in the intervention had an increase in oxytocin — a hormone believed to reduce stress — and a decrease in the stress hormone alpha amylase, especially among the husbands, who at the beginning of the study had higher blood pressure than the women.

Holt-Lunstad sees two possible explanations for the gender-based blood pressure difference: The men might simply benefit more than the women. Or, since the women were all young and healthy and had low blood pressure at the beginning, perhaps they didn't have a lot of room to improve. Regardless, at the end, the blood pressure ratings were no different between the men and women, she said.

The co-authors on the study are Kathleen Light, in anesthesiology at the U., and U. graduate student Wendy Birmingham, who was a student at BYU at the time of the research.

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