There are hundreds of different situations in which people hug. Every day, millions of people hug. Hugs can happen in sad situations (such as in hugging someone who is crying to make them feel better), happy situations (such as hugging someone who has a birthday), or neutral situations (such as hugging someone as a greeting). Besides the emotional situation the hugging people are in, their relationship can also affect the hug. For example, you would expect romantic partners and platonic friends to hug differently. Surprisingly, up to now, no psychological study has investigated how relationship status affects hugging.
A new study on hugging and relationship status
A new study, recently published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (Ocklenburg and coworkers, 2025; Disclaimer: I was one of the authors of this study), focused on finding out how hugs between people in a romantic relationship and people who are just friends differ. In the study, 60 volunteers, some of them friends and the rest romantic partners, repeatedly walked toward each other and hugged each other. While doing so, they were filmed using 14 high-frequency video cameras, so all their movements were captured from many different angles. The resulting videos were then analyzed using advanced AI-based software to investigate various aspects of movements during hugging, such as the duration of the hug or how different body parts of the hugging volunteers (such as knees or feet) were positioned to each other. In addition, the volunteers also answered a few questionnaires about their personality and other aspects.
What were the main findings of the study?
The first main finding of the study was that romantic partners clearly hugged much longer than platonic friends. While lovebirds hugged for 7.02 seconds on average, platonic friends only hugged for 2.88 seconds on average—a strong and statistically significant difference.
Interestingly, no statistically significant differences were found for the distances of different body parts, such as feet or knees, from each other. While one could think that couples hug closer than friends, there were some couples with rather large distances between them. The study also included some friends who hugged quite tightly. This, hugging tightness does not differ between friends and couples, a surprising insight.
Hugging tightness was, however, strongly affected by personality factors. People who showed high neuroticism (a personality trait characterized by issues with dealing well with negative emotions) preferred a larger distance during hugging and, thus, less-tight hugs. In contrast, people with conscientiousness (a personality trait characterized by responsibility and carefulness) preferred shorter distances to their hugging partners and, thus, tighter hugs.
Take-away
The next time you want to know if someone likes you as a friend or maybe a little bit more, pay attention to how long they hug you when saying goodbye. Less than three seconds? You are clearly in the friend zone. Seven seconds or more? They may have more feelings for you than you may have thought.
