When lovers touch, pain eases. Why fathers should be present in the delivery room

Holding your partner’s hand could help ease pain, scientists say as they discovered that through touch, breathing and heartbeats get in sync.

Holding the hand of the woman you love could help ease her pain a study from the University of Colorado says. And the more emphatic the partner is, the more the pain subsides, the results showed.

“The more emphatic the partner and the stronger the analgesic effect, the higher the synchronization between the two when they are touching,” said lead author Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at CU Boulder.

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, involved 22 heterosexual couples and focused on what researchers call “interpersonal synchronization,” the phenomenon in which individuals begin to physiologically mirror the people they’re with.

The new research was prompted by other findings which showed that when people watch an emotional movie or sing together, their heart rates and respiratory rhythms synchronize. When leaders and followers have a good rapport, their brainwaves fall into a similar pattern. And when romantic couples are simply in each other’s presence, their cardiorespiratory and brainwave patterns sync up.

But Goldstein, the lead author of the study, also had a personal experience which led him to believe that holding hands could help ease the pain. It all happened when his wife went into labor.

“My wife was in pain, and all I could think was, ‘What can I do to help her?’ I reached for her hand and it seemed to help,” he recalls. “I wanted to test it out in the lab: Can one really decrease pain with touch, and if so, how?”

The recruits were put into a room mimicking delivery conditions. What they found is that couples synced physiologically to some degree just sitting together. But when she was subjected to pain and he couldn’t touch her, that synchronization was severed. When he was allowed to hold her hand, their rates fell into sync again and her pain decreased.

“It appears that pain totally interrupts this interpersonal synchronization between couples,” Goldstein said. “Touch brings it back.”

Other tests showed that the more emphatic the partner was, the more the pain eased but scientists do not know if decreased pain is causing increased synchronicity, or vice versa. But according to them, touching could actually act like an analgesic.

“It could be that touch is a tool for communicating empathy, resulting in an analgesic, or pain-killing, effect,” said Goldstein.

The study does not show if the same effects are in place when dealing with same sex couples or when men experience pain but Goldstein is committed to probe things further.

Util other results are in, the scientist recommends men to be ready and able to hold their lovers’ hands through trying times.