Why Do We Keep Touching Our Faces? — A Thought Prompted by Dong Yuhui’s Interview with Stephen Chow

I rarely go out of my way to watch Dong Yuhui’s programs, but something caught my attention during his recent interview with Stephen Chow. Throughout the conversation, he repeatedly rested his chin on his hand, supported his cheek with his fingers, or touched and stroked his face. The movements did not look deliberately posed. They seemed largely automatic. They also reminded me that I had a similar habit when I was younger. A small point of contact between my hand and face seemed to make face-to-face conversation feel steadier and more confident. At some point, the habit simply disappeared.

Popular body-language commentary often assigns a fixed meaning to each gesture. Resting the chin supposedly means doubt, touching the face means nervousness, and crossed arms mean defensiveness. Psychology offers little support for such a simple dictionary. The same movement may be caused by fatigue, posture, concentration, the physical setting, an established habit, or an emotional response. Dong’s gestures during one interview cannot tell us his personality or prove that he lacked confidence. Research on self-touch does, however, provide a more useful way to examine what may be happening.

People touch their faces, chins, lips, hair, and arms many times without being fully aware of doing so. Researchers usually describe these movements as spontaneous self-touch. Scratching, lip-biting, and face-touching are also sometimes grouped under displacement behaviour. Such movements become more common under social pressure, emotional disturbance, and cognitive load. They may indicate tension, but they may also help regulate it.

In a 2013 study, psychologists Mohiyeddini and Semple observed 42 adult men during the Trier Social Stress Test, which required participants to give a speech and perform mental arithmetic in front of other people. The researchers recorded displacement behaviours such as scratching, lip-biting, and face-touching. These behaviours were associated with state anxiety, yet participants who displayed more of them reported less stress after the test. The researchers proposed that displacement behaviour may play a short-term role in coping with stress. Read the study

Facial self-touch may also be connected with attention and working memory. A 2014 EEG study found systematic changes in brain activity around episodes of spontaneous facial self-touch. The researchers suggested that these changes may reflect emotional regulation and the maintenance of working memory. A larger replication published in 2022 found a similar pattern, with relevant changes appearing in the first moments after skin contact began. The 2014 EEG study and the 2022 replication

There is also experimental evidence that touch can affect the physiological stress response. In a 2021 randomised controlled trial, participants used brief self-soothing touch before undergoing a social stress test. Compared with a control group, they showed a lower cortisol response and a faster return towards baseline. The intervention involved placing the hands on the chest and abdomen rather than touching the chin, and the effects on reported stress and heart rate were less clear. The study therefore supports a regulatory role for self-touch in general, but it does not show that a particular pose directly produces confidence. Read the randomised controlled trial

The conversation between Dong Yuhui and Stephen Chow placed unusual social and cognitive demands on the interviewer. Dong was speaking with a filmmaker he knew and admired deeply. The planned interview structure repeatedly broke down as Chow and the other guests began asking questions of him instead. Contemporary reporting described this reversal of roles. In that setting, the host had to formulate questions, answer unexpected ones, manage the pace, and regulate his own emotional response at the same time. Frequent facial self-touch would not be surprising, although the gestures alone cannot tell us exactly what he was feeling.

Contact between the fingers and the face provides clear and continuous tactile feedback. Resting the chin also creates a physical point of support. The conversation outside the body remains unpredictable, while the body gains one stable source of sensation. This may assist concentration, speech organisation, and emotional regulation, allowing the person to feel more composed. Resting the chin on the hand does not necessarily reveal an absence of confidence. At times, it may be one of the ways the body helps confidence hold together.

Most of the available research concerns brief episodes of spontaneous self-touch. It cannot fully explain prolonged chin-resting, and it does not justify treating every touch of the face as emotional regulation. Body language is not a codebook. The meaning of a movement depends on its frequency, the subject of the conversation, the relationship between the people present, and whether the same person habitually behaves that way in other settings.

My own earlier habit may therefore have been more than a meaningless mannerism. It may have provided a small amount of physical stability during conversation. Its gradual disappearance probably meant that other ways of maintaining that stability had developed, making that particular gesture unnecessary.