Evidence that androstadienone, a putative human chemosignal, modulates women’s attributions of men’s attractiveness

Abstract

Evidence that androstadienone, a putative human chemosignal, modulates women's attributions of men's attractiveness. Hormones and Behavior, 54 (5 Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University's research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html This document may differ from the final, published version of the research and has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies. To read and/or cite from the published version of the research, please visit the publisher's website (a subscription may be required.)

Androstadienone’s influence on the perception of facial and vocal attractiveness is not sex specific

“…4) is consistent with results of previous studies in women evaluating male (with androstadienone: Saxton et al, 2008) or female stimuli (with androstenol: Kirk-Smith et al, 1978). Our study thus presents additional evidence for an effect that has proved difficult to replicate (Saxton et al, 2008;Lundström and Olsson, 2005). Could this effect be the result of a general positivity of affective dispositions triggered by androstadienone?…”

“…In the main evaluation session, to enable comparison with other studies, we used the same concentration, nature and administration of the odorants as those proposed by Jacob and McClintock (2000) and later used by other researchers (e.g., Lundström et al, 2003a;Saxton et al, 2008). The experimental solution (CA) was a 250 M concentration of androstadienone in propylene glycol with 1% clove oil as a mask odor, and the control solution (C) was 1% clove oil in propylene glycol.…”

“…Research in humans, however has led to much more ambiguous and controversial results. Among the wide variety of substances excreted in human body fluids (urine, saliva, genital secretions and sweat; Stoddart, 1990), several androgen derivatives present in apocrine sweat have received much attention from scientists in the quest to identify human pheromones: androstenone (5␣-androst-16-en-3-one; e.g., Kirk-Smith and Booth, 1980;Pause, 2004), androstenol (5␣-androst-16-en-3␣-ol; e.g., Kirk-Smith et al, 1978;Maiworm and Langthaler, 1992) and, in the most recent studies, androstadienone (androsta-4,16-dien-3-one; e.g., Bensafi et al, 2004a;Hummer and McClintock, 2009;Saxton et al, 2008). At least two main historical reasons can be cited for studying these volatile steroids as possible human pheromones.…”

“…The specificity of this effect toward social stimuli versus non-social objects is under debate (nonspecific: Hummer and McClintock, 2009;specific: Parma et al, 2012). Studies that have explicitly investigated the effect of androstadienone on perceived attractiveness are scarce, having involved only female participants and having evaluated only male stimuli (Lundström and Olsson, 2005;Saxton et al, 2008) or male and female stimuli (Parma et al, 2012). Whereas earlier studies suggested that other similar compounds such as androstenol or androsterone could modulate face attractiveness (Kirk-Smith et al, 1978;Maiworm and Langthaler, 1992), androstadienone was found to have no impact on the perception of face attractiveness (Lundström and Olsson, 2005), to have an effect that is not replicable (significant in one of three speed-dating studies: Saxton et al, 2008), or to have an effect on the perception of same-sex faces only (Parma et al, 2012).…”

The Future of an Applied Evolutionary Psychology for Human Partnerships

“…For example, recent studies show that the quality of a woman's body odor alters across the course of a menstrual cycle, its pleasantness peaking around ovulation (Havlicek, Dvorakova, Bartos, & Flegr, 2006;Singh & Bronstad, 2001) and potentially increasing the chance of conception. Other examples include the association between attractiveness of male body odor and his psychometric dominance (Havlicek et al, 2005) and the effects of naturally occurring odor compounds on women's attributions of men (Saxton, Lyndon, Little, & Roberts, 2008). It seems a reasonable proposition that each of these cues might be masked by an intense fragrance, thus disrupting effects on sexual behavior or mate choice, respectively, although this remains to be tested.…”