Human Olfactory Communication of Emotion

Abstract

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.

Cross‐adaptation of a model human stress‐related odour with fragrance chemicals and ethyl esters of axillary odorants: gender‐specific effects

“…[31] The odour produced in the axillae under the stressful/fearful experimental conditions is different and distinguishable from normally produced axillary odour. [27,28] We suggest that a rapid flux of apocrine secretion onto the skin surface during stressful and frightening situations is responsible for a strong and distinctive axillary odour. In previous studies of the odour of freshly hydrolysed aprocrine secretions we reported, anecdotally, that the odour was stronger, more pungent and sulphurous than the odour collected on pads worn in the axillae for ≥ 8 h/day.…”

“…Work by Chen and Haviland-Jones has demonstrated the ability of underarm odour to be influenced by mood. [27,28] These researchers collected underarm odours from young men and women under two different conditions: when viewing clips of a 'scary' movie or when viewing clips of a 'funny' movie. Volunteers smelled bottles containing odour pads collected from donors.…”

Does Length of Sampling Affect Quality of Body Odor Samples?

“…Sampling length varies highly in previous studies, ranging from 13 min (Chen and Haviland-Jones 2000) up to 7 nights (Hold and Schleidt 1977) (see Table 1 for details). However, studies typically sample odor over either 24 h (e.g., Ferdenzi et al 2009; or two consecutive nights (e.g., Sergeant et al 2007;Thornhill and Gangestad 1999;Wedekind et al 1995).…”

The smell of us – crowdsourcing human body odor evaluation

“…A variety of infectious diseases are marked by characteristic odors including the "stale beer" smell of tuberculosis and the "butcher's shop" odor of Yellow Fever (Shirasu & Touhara, 2011). The aromas of body odor are proposed to correlate with a sweat donor's personality (Sorokowska, 2013), and to indicate moods including happiness and fear (Chen & Haviland-Jones, 2000). In most cases, these odor signals were noticed by human smellers and reported informally long before being systematically investigated for molecular markers.…”