Whether it’s a tough exam, long day at the office or a pile of dirty laundry that’s left you frazzled, new research suggests there may be a quick fix that’s as comforting as a hug to soothe your stress — hearing from Mom.
A small study conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison involved a group of 61 girls between the ages of seven and 12 and their mothers. The study is published in Proceedings B, the Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal.
The girls were asked to take part in a series of public speaking and math performance tasks in front of an audience. The tasks involved thinking about how they wanted to complete a story that was started for them, anticipating being in front of an audience where they would complete the story, and also completing a subtraction test. The process took around 16 minutes.
The kids were then assigned to three groups. The first two groups each had 15 minutes of contact with their mothers, either in person with physical contact, which could include a hug or a kiss on the cheek, or by receiving a phone call from moms in another location. The final group watched a neutral film and had no parental contact.
While levels of stress hormone cortisol increased in all three groups, kids who had direct, interpersonal contact with their moms or verbal contact on the phone were effective in lowering their cortisol levels after an hour.
By the end of the study, the difference between those who simply heard their mother’s voice and those who interacted with parents in person was “statistically indistinguishable.”
Levels of oxytocin — often dubbed the “love hormone” and strongly linked to emotional bonding — also increased within 15 minutes following the task with the effects continuing for as long as an hour afterward.
“Before this study was conducted, it was thought that physical touch was critical for the release of oxytocin under these kinds of scenarios,” said lead author Leslie Seltzer.
“The fact that language can release oxytocin as well is a really interesting finding, and that was very surprising to us.”
While the strength of the mother-daughter bond is evident, it’s unclear whether the same result would be seen with boys.
Researchers opted to use only girls because they thought they would be “more accepting of warm physical touch and verbal contact with their mothers.”
Aside from feeling girls would be more likely to engage in a 15-minute chat with their parents, Seltzer said there was a theoretical reason for choosing girls. Researchers were also looking not just at social bonding but the relationship between those kinds of bonds and stress reduction.
“There’s a theory called ‘tend and befriend’ where girls are less likely to use ‘fight or flight’ behaviour and more likely to use social behaviour to reduce their stress responses,” she said. “It was addressing that theoretical question, but for practical reasons, we thought that girls might also be a good choice.”
Seltzer said while they originally didn’t instruct parents on whether moms or dads should come with their kids, they ended up with mostly moms anyway, and opted to go the moms-only route.
In addition to integrating fathers and boys into the mix in future research, Seltzer said they plan to look at whether the oxytocin effects seen with vocal contact translate to interactions through text messaging.
“If humans are able to have the same pattern of release if they text message, then that would be essentially translating a symbol into a hormonal response, and that would be something that we could say would be definitely unique to humans.”