Nonhuman animals communicate their emotional states through changes in body odor. The study reported here suggests that this may be the same for humans. We collected underarm odors on gauze pads from 25 young women and men on two different occasions. On one occasion the donors were induced to feel happy by viewing an excerpt from a funny movie whereas on the other, separated by a day, they were induced to feel afraid by watching an excerpt from a frightening movie. One week later, 40 women and 37 men were asked to smell several different bottles, some of which contained underarm odor pads collected during the happy movie, some contained underarm odor pads collected during the frightening movie, whereas others contained unused pads (control odor). Each odor was identified on two separate tasks that involved identifying the odor from among three odors and identifying it again from among six odors. Data were the number of women and men who identified an odor correctly on both tasks. When asked to select which bottles contained "the odor of people when they are happy," women chose the correct bottles for both tasks significantly more often than chance. Men chose the bottle which contained the body odors collected when women (but not men) viewed the happy movie more often than would be expected by chance. When asked to select which bottles contained "the odor of people when they are afraid," women and men both chose the bottle that contained the body odors collected when men (but not women) viewed the frightening movie more often than would be expected by chance. The finding suggests that there is information in human body odors indicative of emotional state. This finding introduces new complexity in how humans perceive and interact.

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For more than 5000 years, people have cultivated flowers although there is no known reward for this costly behavior. In three different studies we show that flowers are a powerful positive emotion "inducer". In Study 1, flowers, upon presentation to women, always elicited the Duchenne or true smile. Women who received flowers reported more positive moods 3 days later. In Study 2, a flower given to men or women in an elevator elicited more positive social behavior than other stimuli. In Study 3, flowers presented to elderly participants (55+ age) elicited positive mood reports and improved episodic memory. Flowers have immediate and long-term effects on emotional reactions, mood, social behaviors and even memory for both males and females. There is little existing theory in any discipline that explains these findings. We suggest that cultivated flowers are rewarding because they have evolved to rapidly induce positive emotion in humans, just as other plants have evolved to induce varying behavioral responses in a wide variety of species leading to the dispersal or propagation of the plants.

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Mood odor identification, explicit awareness of mood odor, may be an important emotion skill and part of a complex dual processing system. It has already been shown that mood odors have significant implicit effects, effects that occur without awareness. This study applies methods for examining human individual differences in the identification of chemosignals for fear and happy, important in itself, and a key to understanding the dual processing of emotion in the olfactory system. Axillary mood odors had been collected from 14 male donors during a mood induction task. Pads were collected after 12 and 24 minutes, creating two doses. Sixty -one participants (41 females) identified the mood odor chemosignals. On a single trial, participants identified 2 doses of fear, 2 doses of happy, and a sterile control. There were 15 trials. The first analysis (rtt) showed that the population was phenotypically heterogeneous, not homogeneous, in identification accuracy. It also showed that a minimum of 10 trials was needed for test reliability. The second analysis, Growth Mixture Modeling, found three distinct groups of detectors: (1) 49.49% were consistently accurate super detectors, (2) 32.52% were accurate above chance level detectors, and (3) 17.98% were non-detectors. Bayesian Posterior Analyses showed reliability of groups at or above 98%. No differences related to mood odor valence (fear or happy), dose (collection at 12 or 24 minutes) or gender were found. Implications for further study of genetic differences, learning and function of identification are noted. It appears that many people can be reliable in explicitly identifying fear and happy mood odors but this skill is not homogeneous.

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This thoughtful and beautifully written book demonstrates compellingly that emotions are central to personality development across the lifespan. Carol Magai and Jeannette Haviland-Jones draw on a wealth of textual and film material to forge an original empirical and theoretical analysis of the dynamics of emotion in human development. For its content, the work examines the lives of three mid-century psychologists, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls. Each man adopted a unique stance on the question of emotion in personality and in therapeutic interventions and, tellingly, the therapeutic methods they developed necessarily reflected their own emotional dynamics. Drawing on the most important research in clinical, social, and personality psychology, the authors reveal the pervasive influence of emotional organization in the lives of these individuals. Having presented a new approach to personology, autobiography, autobiography, narrative studies, psychotherapy and the theory of emotions on its publication in 2002, this book is essential reading.