Do you ever get the urge to hold hands with someone while wearing a ridiculous-looking hat? Well if you do, you’re in luck because the The Virginia Affective Neuroscience laboratory is currently conducting a group of hand-holding studies and is looking for students to participate.
The process is very simple: The volunteer brings a (non-romantic) friend of the opposite sex to the lab and is hooked up to a non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) to record brain activity. The subject hooked up to the EEG is then put through a “threat paradigm,” which flashes a set of pictures or symbols, some of which are accompanied with an uncomfortable, but non-painful shock.
“If you’ve ever walked across a carpet and received a shock when touching an electronics device,” the VAN lab’s email said “it feels a bit like that.” The subjects go through the test either alone or holding the hand of the friend they brought along.
The subject is then put through a Stroop Test, where he or she must read the names of colors that are written in colors not matching the word — “blue” written in red ink, for instance — and are tested for speed. Casey Brown, project coordinator for the VAN lab, said the Stroop Test is a classic test of cognitive functioning.
“We are expecting someone who was holding hands during the first test will be faster than those who haven’t been holding hands because they will be less cognitively depleted,” Brown said. “It seems to be less cognitively-depleting to regulate emotions when we’re with other people.”
This is not the first hand-holding study the lab has done, Brown said. A few years ago, Assoc. Psychology Prof. James Coan, director of the VAN lab, ran a similar study with married couples. One spouse was placed in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine to take pictures of brain function and received shocks while holding his or her spouse’s hand, holding the hand of a stranger, or holding no one’s hand. Brown said the “threat activity” in the brain was decreased during hand-holding, meaning the subject experienced less cognitive depletion.
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