Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Being ignored by friends stings at any age, but it can hit hardest in early adolescence, when fitting in with peers starts to matter more than almost anything else. Loneliness among teenagers has been rising worldwide, and repeated rejection can feed anxiety and low mood. A new study suggests that gentle touch helps young teenagers recover from being left out, both in how they feel and in how their hearts respond.
Researchers at the University of Padova and partner institutions in Italy and Germany tested 68 young people aged about 10 to 14. The study is published in Frontiers in Psychology. There were 31 girls and 37 boys.
Wearing a virtual reality headset, each child played a ball-throwing game with two computer-generated players. After 30 throws in which everyone got a fair share, the virtual players passed only to each other for the next 30.
Straight after the game, half the children received a minute of slow, gentle stroking on the forearm from a trained female researcher. The other half heard a recorded stroking sound played from a speaker behind them. Chest electrodes tracked heart activity, and the children rated how positive and how stirred up they felt at each stage.
The children noticed they had been frozen out, and their mood dropped. After touch, their mood returned to where it had been before the game, while the sound group stayed lower. Touch was also linked to feeling calmer, whereas the sound left children feeling more stirred up.
The heart told a similar story during recovery. Children who were stroked showed a larger fall in heart rate, less activity in the body’s fight-or-flight system, and more activity in its rest-and-digest system than those who heard the sound. Being left out did not, however, produce the expected stress pattern in the heart readings in the first place.
The children also completed a questionnaire on loneliness. Those who described themselves as lonelier showed a bigger lift in mood, a bigger sense of calm, and a larger drop in heart rate after touch. In the sound group, lonelier children’s heart rates tended to rise instead.
The study has clear limits. The group was small, no formal calculation of the needed sample size was made, and the loneliness links were exploratory and modest. Touch and sound differed in several ways at once, the touch came from an unfamiliar adult, and the children were not asked whether they found it pleasant. Being snubbed by virtual players may also feel milder than real rejection.
Earlier work by the same team found that stroking, brushing, and tapping all helped adults recover from being left out, compared with no touch at all. The new findings suggest touch offers something a sound alone does not.
A minute of gentle touch helped young teenagers bounce back emotionally and physically after being left out.
