In a recent experiment, students watched a video depicting a female student offering verbal and tactile support to another female student who had failed a midterm exam. The study found that verbal support centered on emotions was perceived as the most effective in boosting self-esteem, self-efficacy, and reducing distress. When the verbal support addressed the problem directly, interactions that included tactile support, such as a hug or a pat on the back, were perceived as more effective. The paper was published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
Throughout life, individuals encounter various stressors, ranging from minor daily inconveniences to severe hardships and even traumatic experiences. During such times, support from others within one’s social circle becomes invaluable. While verbal support is common, often the most potent support is conveyed nonverbally—through actions and gestures.
A common form of nonverbal support is supportive touch, which includes behaviors like patting someone on the back, hugging, or offering a shoulder to cry on. These gestures express affection, immediacy, and trust and are believed to enhance the emotional well-being of the individuals involved. Researchers suggest that supportive touch may also bolster the recipient’s self-esteem.
Study author Samantha J. Shebib (@drshebib) and her colleagues wanted to explore how supportive touch and verbal support messages—whether focused on emotions or the problem at hand—affect self-esteem, self-efficacy, and distress in the person receiving support.
“My doctoral advisor, Dr. Amanda Holmstrom at Michigan State University, is the theorist behind the cognitive-emotional theory of esteem support messages (CETESM),” explained Shebib, who is now an assistant professor and associate scientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and co-editor of Understanding Human Communication.
“Throughout my time working with her, I came to see a gap in our understanding of how esteem support messages take effect. The gap was in addressing the role of nonverbal behaviors—specifically, haptics (the use of touch)—when giving esteem support. Previous CETESM research focused exclusively on verbal instantiations of esteem support messages.”
“While these studies provide valuable insight into how people react (or how they think they or others will react) to verbal esteem support messages, they do not capture nonverbal influences on message content, even though nonverbal and verbal behaviors interact to create the social meaning of supportive interactions. This led me to theorize about how nonverbal behaviors impact the verbal message being communicated.”
To examine this, Shebib and her colleagues conducted a study in which they videotaped a short interaction between two female students. In the scenario, one student named Courtney had failed a midterm exam and was the recipient of support from another student named Payton.
There were four variations of the video, differing in two key ways: whether Payton provided supportive touch (i.e., patting Courtney on the back and hugging her) or refrained from it, and whether Payton’s verbal message focused on the problem (e.g., “Talk to a professor”) or on Courtney’s emotions (e.g., “I’m really sorry that you’re having such a tough time”).
The researchers noted a strong agreement between how individuals personally experience interpersonal interactions and how observers perceive them, as indicated in previous studies. Accordingly, they presented the video to study participants, who then assessed the impact of Payton’s actions on Courtney’s emotional state. The researchers believed that these assessments would closely reflect what someone in Courtney’s position would genuinely feel.
The participants included 409 students from a large Midwestern university, who were recruited through an online participant pool. The average age was 20 years, with 59% identifying as female and 77% as White. Each participant viewed one of the four video variations and evaluated the interaction’s impact on Courtney’s self-esteem, self-efficacy, and distress alleviation. They also rated the severity of Courtney’s situation, the realism of the video scenario, the physical attractiveness of Courtney and Payton, and their own receptiveness to supportive tactile communication.
The results showed that observers rated emotion-focused messages as more effective at enhancing self-esteem, boosting self-efficacy, and reducing distress compared to problem-focused messages. This aligns with previous research suggesting that addressing emotions and self-perceptions is often the most effective way to support someone experiencing a self-esteem threat.
When supportive touch was added to problem-focused messages, observers perceived the support as more effective at enhancing self-esteem and alleviating distress. For example, a hug or pat on the back seemed to soften the directness of problem-focused advice, making it feel more caring and less critical.
“The most novel contribution of my colleagues’ and my study is that in the supportive tactile communication conditions, observers had higher perceptions of the recipient’s enhanced state self-esteem compared to the no supportive tactile communication conditions,” Shebib told PsyPost.
Unlike its effects on self-esteem and distress, however, supportive touch did not significantly influence perceptions of self-efficacy.
“I was probably most surprised that supportive tactile communication did not influence observers’ ratings of enhanced state self-efficacy because it contradicts past research,” Shebib said. “Self-efficacy refers to one’s confidence in one’s ability to accomplish a goal. However, I think this was due to our participants being third-party observers and not actually in the interaction itself. Perhaps self-efficacy is a state that must be internally reconciled and is difficult to interpret for an observer.”
The study sheds light on the effects of supportive touch in situations that pose a threat to self-esteem. However, it is important to note that the participants and actors were all students, which may limit the generalizability of the results to other demographic groups. Additionally, whether a touch is perceived as supportive, neutral, or unwelcome can vary depending on the context and the relationship between the individuals involved.
“The major limitation lies in the fact that participants were third-party observers and were not actually participating in the supportive interaction,” Shebib noted. “Therefore, we were unable to draw conclusions about esteem support messages with the presence or absence of supportive tactile communication from recipients currently experiencing an esteem threat and interacting face-to-face with a support provider.”
“My longer-term goal related to this study is twofold: first, I want to investigate other nonverbal behaviors. Second, I want to conduct a laboratory experiment with individuals going through an esteem-threatening situation and train confederates on the manipulated message (emotion-focused vs. problem-focused) while also manipulating the use of touch.”
The paper, “An Experimental Investigation of Supportive Tactile Communication During Esteem Support Conversations,” was authored by Samantha J. Shebib, Josephine K. Boumis, Amanda Allard, Amanda J. Holmstrom, and Adam J. Mason.