Testing for Individual Differences in the Identification of Chemosignals for Fear and Happy: Phenotypic Super-Detectors, Detectors and Non-Detectors

Abstract

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.

The scent of emotions: A systematic review of human intra‐ and interspecific chemical communication of emotions

“…A wide spectrum of stimuli was assessed to induce emotion in the donors. Fear was evoked by watching horror video clips in 14 studies (Ackerl, Atzmueller, & Grammer, 2002; Chen, 2006; Chen & Haviland‐Jones, 2000; Ferreira et al, 2018; de Groot et al, 2012, 2018; de Groot, Semin, & Smeets, 2014a, 2014b; Groot, Smeets, Rowson, et al, 2015; Haviland‐Jones, McGuire, & Wilson, 2016; Iversen et al, 2015; Kamiloğlu et al, 2018; Zhou & Chen, 2009, 2011). In 10 studies, anxiety sweat was collected from students awaiting an oral examination at the university (Adolph, Meister, & Pause, 2013; Lübke, Busch, Hoenen, Schaal, & Pause, 2017; Pause, 2004a; Pause et al, 2009; Pause, Lübke, Laudien, & Ferstl, 2010; Prehn et al, 2006; Prehn‐Kristensen et al, 2009; Rocha et al, 2018; Wudarczyk et al, 2015, 2016).…”

“…Main outcomes were very heterogeneous too: Correct identification of the target emotion or odor rating was the main outcome of five studies (Ackerl et al, 2002; Chen & Haviland‐Jones, 2000; Haviland‐Jones et al, 2016; Iversen et al, 2015; Zhou & Chen, 2011). The influence of emotional chemosignals on cognitive tasks like performing word association while smelling one of the three types of olfactory stimuli was used by one research group (Chen, 2006).…”

“…Overall, negative emotions of the donor, as anxiety and fear, seem to be perceived by and influence social behavior in the recipient, inducing defense (Adolph et al, 2010), modifying risk‐taking behavior (Haegler et al, 2010), influencing performances in cognitive and perceptive tasks (de Groot & Smeets, 2017) by altering neuronal responses in the amygdala (Mujica‐Parodi et al, 2009), and in brain areas involved in the processing of emotions (Ackerl et al, 2002; Chen, 2006; Groot, Smeets, & Semin, 2015; Endevelt‐Shapira et al, 2018; Haviland‐Jones et al, 2016; Lübke et al, 2017; Pause, 2004a).…”

Qualitative Analysis of Emotions: Fear and Thrill

“…At a neurophysiological level, fear can arise through multiple pathways, and fear of pain is different from fear of attack ( LeDoux, 2000 , 2012a , b ; Gross and Canteras, 2012 ; Adolphs, 2013 ; Tordjman et al, 2013 ). Humans also emit and detect fear pheromones ( Ackerl et al, 2002 ; Mujica-Parodi et al, 2009 ; de Groot et al, 2015 ; Haviland-Jones et al, 2016 ). Individuals exposed to these, or to other cues of fear or threat, experience heightened perception and more rapid cognitive processing ( Chen et al, 2006 ; Grillon and Charney, 2011 ; Grupe and Nitschke, 2013 ; Robinson et al, 2013 ; Stout et al, 2013 ; Jackson et al, 2014 ; de Valk et al, 2015 ; Sussman et al, 2015 ; White et al, 2016 ) and may take more risks ( Maner and Gerend, 2007 ; Haegler et al, 2010 ), though this also depends on anger ( Habib et al, 2015 ).…”

Aww: The Emotion of Perceiving Cuteness

“…In particular, emotions are one of the main components of human communications, including: facial expressions, postures and body language, pheromones and chemosignals, non-linguistic vocalizations, and spoken language (Lambie, 2009; Niedenthal and Brauer, 2012; Dehaene, 2014; Van den Stock and de Gelder, 2014; Lench et al, 2015; Ekman, 2016; Haviland-Jones et al, 2016; Martinez et al, 2016). …”