Hugging — What Does It Mean? [podcast 77]

A scientifical Swedish attempt to get a mental grasp on hugging — that’s the central thing in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

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This week, Marc Abrahams  — with dramatic readings by Harvard chemist Daniel Rosenberg — tells about:

Hugging and what it means, maybe — “Meanings of hugging: From greeting behavior to touching implications,” Lena M. Forsell and Jan A. Åström, Comprehensive Psychology, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2012.


A possibly-confused British man’s video testimony about Swedish hugging:

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).