The human body odor compound androstadienone leads to anger-dependent effects in an emotional Stroop but not dot-probe task using human faces

Abstract

The androgen derivative androstadienone is a substance found in human sweat and thus is a putative human chemosignal. Androstadienone has been studied with respect to effects on mood states, attractiveness ratings, physiological and neural activation. With the current experiment, we aimed to explore in which way androstadienone affects attention to social cues (human faces). Moreover, we wanted to test whether effects depend on specific emotions, the participants' sex and individual sensitivity to smell androstadienone. To do so, we investigated 56 healthy individuals (thereof 29 females taking oral contraceptives) with two attention tasks on two consecutive days (once under androstadienone, once under placebo exposure in pseudorandomized order). With an emotional dot-probe task we measured visuo-spatial cueing while an emotional Stroop task allowed us to investigate interference control. Our results suggest that androstadienone acts in a sex, task and emotion-specific manner as a reduction in interference processes in the emotional Stroop task was only apparent for angry faces in men under androstadienone exposure. More specifically, men showed a smaller difference in reaction times for congruent compared to incongruent trials. At the same time also women were slightly affected by smelling androstadienone as they classified angry faces more often correctly under androstadienone. For the emotional dot-probe task no modulation by androstadienone was observed. Furthermore, in both attention paradigms individual sensitivity to androstadienone was neither correlated with reaction times nor error rates in men and women. To conclude, exposure to androstadienone seems to potentiate the relevance of angry faces in both men and women in connection with interference control, while processes of visuo-spatial cueing remain unaffected.

Background odors affect behavior in a dot-probe task with emotionally expressive faces

“…The dot-probe task was based on standard procedures and stimulus durations used in previous research such as Holmes et al (2009) and Hornung et al (2017). Each trial in the dot-probe task consisted of a fixation cross at the center of the screen, and participants were instructed to keep their gaze on it for the complete duration of each trial.…”

“…The results indicated, somewhat unintuitively, that response latencies were longer for fearful faces in the left visual field in the negative odor condition. Another study found no evidence for attentional effects on faces in the dot-probe task using the human body odor component androstadienone, a compound that has been suggested to affect mood states and attentional processes (Hornung et al, 2017). It should be highlighted that the facial expressions in these studies did not directly match the odor-evoked emotions, as fearful and angry faces were used, whereas unpleasant odors typically elicit disgust (Ferdenzi et al, 2011).…”

“…A reanalysis of these RT data, obtained via personal communication with the authors, also indicated general arousal effects manifested in fast RTs in the odor condition. So far, only a few studies have investigated the link between odors and facial emotion on the dotprobe task and the effects of spatial attention (Forscher & Li, 2012;Hornung, Kogler, Wolpert, Freiherr, & Derntl, 2017). In a recent study, Forscher and Li (2012) used rose oxide and pine resin as neutral odors, and valeric acid and hexanoic acid as negative odors.…”

Olfaction in the Multisensory Processing of Faces: A Narrative Review of the Influence of Human Body Odors

“…Furthermore, a visual priming study using neutral faces reported no influence of androstadienone on attentional prioritization of social over nonsocial stimuli (see study 3 in Hummer and McClintock, 2009). Besides, several studies using the modified emotional Stroop task (e.g., faces with fearful and happy expressions presented with the words "happy" or "fear" written across them, Etkin et al, 2006) either found small effects on reduction of error rates, but not reaction times (Hornung et al, 2018b), reported findings limited to angry faces and to male participants (Hornung et al, 2017), or failed to find effects of androstadienone (Hornung et al, 2018a).…”

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

“…Despite this definition, until now, there is no clear evidence of which molecules are able to vehicle emotions, several molecules have been indicated as chemosignals, and these molecules have to be differentiated from odors and volatile substances (Table 1 and 2). Among these molecules, the testosterone metabolite androstadienone has been indicated as a putative chemosignal and suggested to be able to communicate dominance and social threat by several studies (Banner, Frumin, & Shamay‐Tsoory, 2018; Banner & Shamay‐Tsoory, 2018; Frey, Weyers, Pauli, & Mühlberger, 2012; Hornung, Kogler, Wolpert, Freiherr, & Derntl, 2017; Zhou et al, 2014).…”