This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science. I'm Lucy Wong.

When a friend comes to you after a stressful day, how do you comfort them?

Do you let them rant? Do you pour them a glass of wine?

Those could work, but a new study finds that a very effective technique is also simple and easy.

Michael Murphy is a psychology postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

He wanted to know if people who received hugs regularly could handle stress and conflict better.

Individuals who report perceiving the availability of a network of supportive individuals

tend to show better adaptation when faced with stress.

But just because you have a support network doesn't mean that you definitely feel that support.

So some researchers have argued that many of the behaviors we use to support others who are stressed

might actually be counterproductive because these behaviors might unintentionally communicate

others that they're not competent to manage stress. Murphy and his team

interviewed 404 men and women every evening for two weeks. During these interviews, the participants were asked a simple yes or no question whether somebody had hugged them that day,

and a simple yes or no question of whether they had experienced conflict or tension with

somebody that day. They also were asked questions about their social

interactions, how many social interactions they had that day and I responded to

questions about negative and positive mood states.

And the researchers found that individuals who experienced a conflict were not as negatively affected

if they received a hug that day, as were participants who experienced conflict and didn't get a hug.

Murphy and his team also saw that people who received a hug didn't carry the negative effect

to the next day, while those who did not receive a hug would. The findings are in the journal

Plause 1. Murphy does include this caveat. So our findings should not be

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