Bit of a squeeze So does a three-minute hugging rule make sense?

Be it a brief squeeze or a bone-crushing bear hug, few can deny the comfort of a farewell cuddle from a person you love. Yet in a bid to keep traffic flowing at Dunedin international airport on New Zealand's South Island, bosses have decided to impose a three-minute cap on hugging in the airport's drop-off zone.

- Linda Geddes

Passengers wishing to engage in longer and fonder farewells have been instructed to use the car park instead. This is fortunate, because hugging bestows an array of physical and psychological benefits, experts say.

Humans are not the only creature to indulge in hug-like behaviour; many monkeys and apes comb through each other's fur, and it is likely that human hugging has evolved as an extension of this.

"The basic method of social bonding for creating relationships is through physical touch," says Prof Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford.