smell_of

The scent of fear
01 May 99

We all have a nose for other people's emotions

PEOPLE know the smell of fear and can distinguish it from the
fragrance of relaxed happiness, a new report says.

                                 In animals, smell conveys a great deal of information. For instance,
                                 rodents can detect fear through smell. When the odour of rats that
                                 have been given a mild electric shock blows into cages of rats that
                                 have not been shocked, they behave in a nervous manner. But it has
                                 been unclear whether smell can convey similar information in people.

                                 Now Denise Chen of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia
                                 and Jeannette Haviland at Rutgers University in New Jersey have
                                 shown that people at least recognise the smell of fear and
                                 happiness. They asked 11 men and 14 women to wear absorbent pads
                                 in their armpits while they watched movie excerpts. On different days,
                                 they were shown clips from the light, funny film Ace Ventura and
                                 scary excerpts from an Indiana Jones film.

                                 The researchers put the pads into four jars, separating happy from
                                 fearful and female from male. They also added neutral control jars
                                 that smelt the same as the room. Then they asked 37 men and 40
                                 women to sniff the jars in various combinations and pick out the
                                 happy or scared smells.

                                 Most volunteers said they couldn't smell anything, but their guesses
                                 were very accurate. "Women were especially good at picking the male
                                 fear odour," says Chen. More than three-quarters of the women, and
                                 more than half the men, identified the one jar smelling of fearful men
                                 out of six jars. More than half the women identified the smell of
                                 happy men.

                                 But men could not detect the happy smell of other males or fear
                                 from females, Chen told a meeting of the Association of
                                 Chemoreception Science in Sarasota, Florida. She suspects the
                                 women detected fear and happiness more easily because they
                                 generally have a better sense of smell.

                                 Eric Albone, a chemist with the Clifton Scientific Trust, says the test
                                 supports what some scientists have long suspected. "I'm absolutely
                                 certain that all sorts of things are expressed in sweat," he says. "It
                                 wouldn't surprise me if you could detect all manner of things."

                                 Alison Motluk
                                  From New Scientist magazine, vol 162 issue 2184, 01/05/1999, page
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