The skin hunger has remained. Out research that this month Nature has been published, it appears that people want to be touched more, even after the corona pandemic. A group of psychologists at Utrecht University asked whether people needed more touch, both during and after the pandemic.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, this was the case for 86 percent of participants. That seems high, but according to this research, the share of people who are skin hungry after the pandemic is still 80 percent. Skin hunger is less severe after the pandemic.
Participants were asked to indicate how strongly they agreed with the statements ‘I would like to be touched by others right now’ and ‘I would like to touch others right now’. They could specify a value between 0 (I want less touch) and 100 (I want more touch).
The psychologists speak of ‘skin hunger’ if the value is higher than 50. People then want more touch than they experience in daily life.
Between April and October 2020, strict corona measures required people to keep a distance of one and a half meters and there were lockdowns in the Netherlands. It was the time when the RIVM website advised that singles could choose a ‘cuddle buddy’ or ‘sex buddy’, provided they were both free of complaints.
During this period, more than half of the participants gave a high value (higher than 75) to their skin hunger. The majority of the people who answered the questions online were in their early 30s, female and living in the Netherlands.
In the autumn of 2021, when large-scale events were allowed to take place again for the first time, the psychologists visited two science festivals. There, about one in three people (again, mainly young women) gave a high value to their skin hunger. At the end of 2022, when all Covid measures had been lifted, a lot fewer participants gave a high rating to their skin hunger online: about one in six.
German research
80 percent of participants still felt the need for more touch after the pandemic. The finding that people still want to be touched more than they are, even when there are no rules in place social distancing, is consistent with results from a German study conducted before the pandemic. It showed that 73 percent of the participants had skin hunger.
According to the Utrecht researchers, a lack of touch is generally associated with a reduced ability to deal with stress. Touch also plays an important role in establishing connections with others and in some cases it even seems to reduce physical pain. So the idea of giving a kiss on a wound may not be so crazy. And don’t put your arm around someone more often.