Are You a Hugger?
How you feel about touch - receiving it, giving it and missing it
Some people greet everyone with a hug; others stiffen when a colleague touches their arm. Neither is wrong, but the difference shapes friendships, relationships and even how at ease you feel in a crowd. Researchers mapped where people allow others to touch them and found that the map shrinks sharply as the relationship gets less close. This test looks at your own map: how comfortable you are being touched, how often you reach out, and how much you miss it.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about everyday touch with friends, family, partners and acquaintances - hugs, greetings, a hand on the shoulder. Think of how you usually feel, not of one particular person.
What it measures
Comfort with everyday social touch, the attitude the Social Touch Questionnaire was built to measure, plus two related tendencies: how often you initiate affectionate touch, and how much you want more of it. This is not the love-language idea of physical touch, which is about how you prefer to receive love from a partner; it is about touch across all your relationships, including strangers and acquaintances.
Based on: Social Touch Questionnaire (Wilhelm, Kochar, Roth & Gross, 2001) and research on affectionate touch
Possible results
Comfort with touch
How relaxed you feel when others touch you in everyday situations.
Reaching out
How often you start affectionate touch yourself.
Wanting more
How much you miss affectionate touch when it is absent.
Common questions
Is disliking touch a sign that something is wrong with me?
Not in itself. Comfort with touch varies a great deal between people, and much of that variation reflects temperament, culture and how touch was handled in your family. Preferring less of it is a preference, not a disorder. It is worth talking to a professional only if touch causes real distress, interferes with relationships you want, or brings back painful memories.
Why am I fine hugging some people but not others?
Because that is how touch works for almost everyone. When researchers asked people across several countries which parts of the body others could touch, the permitted area was large for partners and close family and shrank steeply for acquaintances and strangers. Your comfort tracks the emotional bond, and that selectivity is normal.
What if my partner and I want very different amounts of touch?
It is common and workable, but it needs saying out loud. The person who wants more often reads less touch as less love; the person who wants less often feels pressured. Naming specific, easy gestures - a hug hello, holding hands on a walk - tends to work better than negotiating over a vague amount.
Sources
- Wilhelm, F. H., Kochar, A. S., Roth, W. T., & Gross, J. J. (2001). Social anxiety and response to touch: Incongruence between self-evaluative and physiological reactions. Biological Psychology. doi:10.1016/s0301-0511(01)00113-2
- Suvilehto, J. T., Glerean, E., Dunbar, R. I. M., Hari, R., & Nummenmaa, L. (2015). Topography of social touching depends on emotional bonds between humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1519231112
- Floyd, K. (2014). Relational and health correlates of affection deprivation. Western Journal of Communication. doi:10.1080/10570314.2014.927071
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording adapted from the Social Touch Questionnaire, so scores are not comparable to its published norms. Only the first bar corresponds to that scale; the other two are related constructs from research on affectionate touch, not validated factors of it. That questionnaire's original sample was all women, and touch norms vary between cultures and families. This is not a clinical assessment: if touch feels distressing or is tied to painful experiences, a psychologist can help. Nobody is obliged to accept touch they do not want.