Touch or Words? Therapists’ Personal Preferences Shape Their Evaluation of Comfort Behaviors in Psychotherapy

When someone is distressed, comfort can be offered through words or touch, and people respond more positively to whichever fits their own preference. We refer to this as the Modality-Matching Comfort Effect (Valori et al., 2026). Social touch reduces distress and fosters connectedness (Goldstein et al., 2018; von Mohr et al., 2017), but its effects vary between individuals (Croy et al., 2021; Trotter et al., 2018). Most previous work has focused on everyday interactions, leaving open how psychotherapists, whose use of touch is shaped by ethical and normative frameworks, evaluate physical closeness with patients. In an online study (Gorilla), psychotherapists in Germany and Italy rate short vignettes that vary in comfort modality (touch vs. words) and in the gender of the depicted patient, while the depicted therapist matches the participant's own gender. The primary hypothesis (H1) tests whether therapists' personal touch preferences predict how favorably they evaluate touch-based versus word-based comfort. Two secondary confirmatory hypotheses test whether therapists higher in personal distress anticipate feeling more negative when comforting through touch (H2), and whether a mixed-gender therapist-patient pairing is evaluated differently from a same-gender pairing (H3). Therapeutic orientation, clinical experience, and further touch attitudes are examined in exploratory and descriptive analyses. All hypotheses are tested with mixed-effects models that account for the repeated vignette ratings within participants.