UC Santa Barbara

Recent research has shown the benefits of affectionate touch in romantic relationships, such as how engaging in touch can promote relationship quality and buffer stress, but no prior research has examined how touch affects willingness to sacrifice for one’s partner or how contextual factors might moderate this link, such as intimacy level. We manipulated touch in the lab by assigning one couple member (the target) to receive or not receive touch from their partner, and we also manipulated whether this occurred in a context low or high in intimacy. Afterwards, we measured targets’ willingness to sacrifice behaviorally (dividing tickets to determine who would do a stressful task) and via a self-report measure (willingness to replace one’s partner to do the stressful task). We predicted that receiving touch generally would lead to higher willingness to sacrifice than not receiving touch. Also, we predicted that touch and intimacy level would interact, where targets would be the most willing to sacrifice when receiving touch in a high intimacy context, and least willing if they do not receive touch in a high intimacy context. Although results did not support these hypotheses in the full sample, we found that female targets who received touch were less willing to sacrifice than male targets who received touch. Additionally, targets (regardless of gender) receiving touch reported marginally higher perceived partner responsiveness than targets who did not. Our findings can advance our understanding of affectionate touch’s role in close relationships and determine when touch can benefit individuals and relationships.