Hold tight: How human and robotic touch shape our fear response

Monday 2 February 2026

Does holding someone’s hand really help when you are watching a scary movie? During a festival (Lowlands) last summer, Professor Jan van Erp and PhD candidate Marie-Laure Snijders from the Human Media Interaction department collaborated on an innovative study examining the relationship between social touch and physiological responses to fear and stress. Organised by the Dutch Touch Society, a collaborative research group comprising multiple Dutch universities and research institutions, the “Hold Tight” experiment provided a unique opportunity to investigate how human and robotic physical contact affects the stress levels of a large group of festival visitors.

The experiment divided participants into four conditions: holding hands with familiar companions, holding hands with a stranger, cuddling with a special cuddle robot and a control group receiving no physical contact. While participants viewed a horror film enhanced with immersive multisensory elements (such as UV lighting, the addition of a metal scent spread into the room and well-timed and sudden vibration of the chair during jump scares), the researchers recorded their physiological responses.

Relationship between social touch and perceived stress

Additional measurements were taken of the detection and maximum comfort thresholds of electrocutaneous stimulation and participants’ overall experienced stress levels during the experiment, to provide a more in-depth evaluation of the effect of social touch. The first analyses of this data already seem to indicate that there is indeed a relationship between social touch and perceived stress. Further outcomes of this study are currently being analysed for publication.

Academic research and public engagement

Science during a festival offers researchers the opportunity to conduct their experiments with a large group of people. This setup bridges the gap between academic research and public engagement. A festival setting allows researchers access to an enthusiastic group of participants willing to join different experiments, while visitors enjoy the opportunity to learn about ongoing research and participate in exciting and innovative study designs. For studies investigating social touch and fear responses, Science during a festival proved to be particularly valuable, enabling the researchers to gather extensive data from a diverse pool of participants as well as highlight the importance of social touch as a research topic. This setup of interdisciplinary collaboration demonstrates how festivals can serve as dynamic platforms for unique and large-scale research studies while fostering public appreciation for scientific research.