Association of hugs with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation: findings based on data from the general adult population in Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim To investigate the association between the frequency of hugs and probable depression, probable anxiety, and suicidal ideation in the German adult population. Subject and methods Cross-sectional data were used from the German general adult population aged 18 to 74 years (representative in terms of sex, age, and federal state) with n = 3270 that were obtained in an online survey in January 2025. The frequency of daily hugs served as the independent variable. Probable depression and anxiety were quantified using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) or Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), respectively. Suicidal ideation was assessed using the final item of the PHQ-9. Logistic regression was used to examine associations. Robustness checks were also conducted. Results Hugging others (on average one and two to three; compared to individuals not hugging others) on a daily basis is associated with lower odds of probable depression (e.g., hugging one individual: OR 0.65; 95% CI, 0.51 to 0.83), probable anxiety (e.g., hugging one individual: OR 0.73; 95% CI, 0.56 to 0.95), and suicidal ideation (e.g., hugging one individual: OR 0.66; 95% CI, 0.52 to 0.85). Hugging on average two to three individuals daily was also associated with significantly lower odds for all outcomes, whereas hugging four or more individuals was only significantly associated with lower odds of probable depression. Conclusion Hugging one to three individuals each day may assist in preventing poor mental health. However, future longitudinal evidence is needed to confirm this.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".