Smells are not only important in our relationship with food and the natural world. They also play a role in how we communicate with the people we know.
The Impact of Losing Smell
After a viral infection deprived her of her sense of smell, Chrissy Kelly, an American archaeologist living in the UK, no longer felt like herself. It was as if she was “floating away,” disconnected from the rest of the world. She says that smell is something that connects us to nature and our families, and without it, we cannot fully participate in daily life. She missed the social aspect of scents: the deep joy of hugging someone you love and inhaling their personal scent. “I found living without a sense of smell profoundly confusing,” she says.
The Impact of Scents on Behavior
Kelly felt so strongly about what happened to her that she founded a charity called “Abscent” to help people who have lost their sense of smell. She is now receiving confirmation, as noted by Kelly, that smell is a part of a person’s identity from recent research findings. A study by European researchers in 2023, for example, found that we can not only detect the scent of others’ fear or anxiety, but such emotions also affect our feelings. Another study from China showed that people with a better sense of smell have more friends. “We see all sorts of behavioral effects,” says Shani Agron, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
The History of Neglecting the Sense of Smell
Humans have a long history of neglecting our senses – even Darwin claimed that the sense of smell has “very little use” for humans. According to Bettina Pause, a biopsychologist at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, this may be because social smelling occurs outside our conscious attention. “The only thing I might know about this interaction is a change in physical feeling,” she says. However, humans seem perfectly capable of sensing the body odor of another person. One study found that after shaking hands with people of the same sex, individuals sniffed their right hand more than twice as much as they did before the greeting.
Sensing Scents and Social Communication
We pick up a lot of information through sensing the body odor of those around us: we can recognize our relatives, identify who is related to us, and determine potential friends (we tend to choose friends who share our genetics and have similar body odors). In one study, most new mothers were able to identify their baby by its smell after spending just 10 minutes together, and infants can also recognize their mothers.
Additionally, adult humans can match with each other based on their body odor, even if siblings live far apart. In a 2022 study, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science were able to predict which volunteers would connect just by comparing their body odors – something both human sniffers and an electronic nose (a device resembling an old CB radio with a hose) did. Scientists found that people who smelled similar to each other were more likely to enjoy chatting and reported feeling instant chemistry. This aligns with previous research showing that we automatically choose friends who share some of the same genes.
Scents and Emotional Feelings
Furthermore, if we are talking to someone who feels happy, we are likely to detect their current emotional state through the scents reaching our noses. In an experiment conducted in the Netherlands, volunteers watched uplifting videos while holding absorbent pads in their armpits. Later, when another group sniffed the pads, measurements of their facial muscle activity revealed that their mood had improved as well: their smiling muscles moved more.
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That, it is not just happy feelings that can be expressed through body odor. A study in 2020 showed that women’s brains responded more strongly when they smelled the sweat of men who played an aggressive competitive game compared to the smell of men who just enjoyed a quiet building game. The study also revealed that women were particularly sensitive to odors indicating anxiety in males. Upon sensing such odors, they became more risk-averse and less confident. “Anxiety is a signal of ‘Please, I need help,’” says Powell. She believes this may explain why women appear to be more sensitive to the smell of anxiety—historically, in sad situations, it was women who cared for the young and vulnerable. These evolutionary links may also explain why women with more discerning noses perform better on empathy tests, as a small study by Powell and her colleagues in 2022 revealed.
Smell and Social Life
Generally, a sensitive nose seems to enhance our deep social lives. A 2020 study found that those who could better distinguish everyday odors reported feeling less lonely. In other experiments, individuals with a better sense of smell had larger social networks and more friends, and they met those friends more frequently. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain revealed that the same brain circuits may be involved in both our sense of smell and the size of our social circle.
Future Research
However, the mechanisms of how humans sense body odors and translate them into changes in our behavior remain largely a mystery. “It’s a multifaceted issue that we really haven’t begun to untangle yet,” according to Johan Lundström, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Scientists have also only just begun to identify the chemicals in body odor that may be responsible for affecting social relationships. One of these compounds might be hexanal, which gives a pleasant fresh-cut grass smell—and seems to enhance trust in people. However, we still do not know if individuals with more hexanal in their body odor are considered more trustworthy, according to Monique Smit, a social psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
More research is likely to follow as, as Agron says, “the pandemic really shone a light on the sense of smell.” Although Omicron seems less destructive to our noses compared to earlier strains of COVID, a 2023 study estimates that 11.7 percent of European adults who contracted Omicron have some degree of smell disorder. People who have lost their sense of smell may eventually overcome unconscious but important ways of communicating with others. Smell should be revered because it is our most honest sense—something we cannot fake like our words or facial expressions. “I can laugh even though I’m sad or aggressive, but I can’t deliberately change my chemical messages,” says Powell. “It’s kind of the only information you can trust.”
Source: Marta Zaraska
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-can-literally-sniff-out-other-peoples-inner-feelings/
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