Fear-Related Chemosignals Modulate Recognition of Fear in Ambiguous Facial Expressions

Abstract

Integrating emotional cues from different senses is critical for adaptive behavior. Much of the evidence on cross-modal perception of emotions has come from studies of vision and audition. This research has shown that an emotion signaled by one sense modulates how the same emotion is perceived in another sense, especially when the input to the latter sense is ambiguous. We tested whether olfaction causes similar sensory modulation of emotion perception. In two experiments, the chemosignal of fearful sweat biased women toward interpreting ambiguous expressions as more fearful, but had no effect when the facial emotion was more discernible. Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that social chemosignals can communicate emotions and demonstrate that fear-related chemosignals modulate humans' visual emotion perception in an emotion-specific way--an effect that has been hitherto unsuspected.

Exploring the Emotional Dimension of Visitors' Satisfaction at Cultural Events

“…Also, while observing the gestures, postures, and facial expressions of people in specific cases, the emotional state of respondents was further revealed (Kalat, 2011;Zhou & Chen, 2009). The ethnographer's comments reveal the emotion of "fear" among visitors:…”

Emotion Perception: Putting the Face in Context

“…Even a target person's sweat can influence perception of emotion from the face (Zhou & Chen, 2009). For example, researchers collected sweat from target individuals while they viewed videos designed to induce fear or happiness.…”

Scalable interrogation: Eliciting human pheromone responses to deception in a security interview setting

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