I want to hold your hand: Easy stress reduction

Perhaps The Beatles were on to something with their hand-holding 1963 hit. As far as couples are concerned, holding hands may just be an easy yet effective way to reduce stress. After all, who doesn't get that warm and fuzzy feeling inside whenever someone reaches out to grab you?

A study suggests that married couples who are both happy in their relationship tend to benefit from holding hands under stressful situations (at least from the woman's point of view anyway). After being hooked up to electrodes and subjected to mild shocks around the ankles, women who held the hand of their male counterpart were found to have calmer minds than when they held no hand at all.

Couples who were in the happiest relationships were shown to have better results than marriages rated slightly lower (but still happy). Strangely enough, they didn't scan the brains of the husbands during these tests, so they have no idea how it affects them. This kind of study appears somewhat obvious: any happy couple can list the benefits of holding each other's hand! However, it just proves the saying that indeed "no man is an island."