Neuroscience
If you're an empathic person, able to tune into other people's feelings, then the chances are you've also got a keen sense of what other people smell like! We've known for some time that the brain areas involved in empathy and recognising facial emotions partially overlap with the brain areas associated with smell. Wen Zhou's and Denise Chen's new finding shows that this overlap extends to behavioural performance.
Forty-four female university students were twice tasked with smelling three t-shirts and picking out the one that belonged to their room-mate. The t-shirts had been carefully prepared - worn overnight for an average of eight hours, after the owner had used scent-free toiletries for the previous two days.
Based on their performance, the students were arranged in three groups: 21 of them failed both times to pick out the correct t-shirt; 10 of them picked the correct t-shirt once; and 13 of them picked the correct t-shirt both times. The key finding was that the students who both times identified their room-mate's t-shirt by its smell also tended to excel at a test of identifying facial emotional expressions, and at a test of empathy in which they had to say how someone would feel in a range of different situations.
The students' confidence in their choices of t-shirt showed no association with their actual performance, thus suggesting that the ability to identify a room-mate's smell appeared to be implicit.
Further analysis showed that it was specifically the students' skill at using smell for "social" purposes that was linked with empathy. General keenness of smell and the ability to name a range of different odours were not linked to empathy in any way. The intensity and pleasantness of the t-shirt smells were also unrelated to the students' ability to identify their room-mates.
"To our knowledge, this study provides the first empirical evidence of the behavioural connection between a sensory system and emotional processing," the researchers said. "The behavioural findings reported here suggest that sociochemical signals may tap into a broader network of social cognition and emotion, and that similar underlying mechanisms may regulate sociochemosensory and emotional competencies."
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Zhou W, & Chen D (2009). Sociochemosensory and emotional functions: behavioral evidence for shared mechanisms. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20 (9), 1118-24 PMID: 19686296
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Empathic people remember your smell
Forty-four female university students were twice tasked with smelling three t-shirts and picking out the one that belonged to their room-mate. The t-shirts had been carefully prepared - worn overnight for an average of eight hours, after the owner had used scent-free toiletries for the previous two days.
Based on their performance, the students were arranged in three groups: 21 of them failed both times to pick out the correct t-shirt; 10 of them picked the correct t-shirt once; and 13 of them picked the correct t-shirt both times. The key finding was that the students who both times identified their room-mate's t-shirt by its smell also tended to excel at a test of identifying facial emotional expressions, and at a test of empathy in which they had to say how someone would feel in a range of different situations.
The students' confidence in their choices of t-shirt showed no association with their actual performance, thus suggesting that the ability to identify a room-mate's smell appeared to be implicit.
Further analysis showed that it was specifically the students' skill at using smell for "social" purposes that was linked with empathy. General keenness of smell and the ability to name a range of different odours were not linked to empathy in any way. The intensity and pleasantness of the t-shirt smells were also unrelated to the students' ability to identify their room-mates.
"To our knowledge, this study provides the first empirical evidence of the behavioural connection between a sensory system and emotional processing," the researchers said. "The behavioural findings reported here suggest that sociochemical signals may tap into a broader network of social cognition and emotion, and that similar underlying mechanisms may regulate sociochemosensory and emotional competencies."
_________________________________
Zhou W, & Chen D (2009). Sociochemosensory and emotional functions: behavioral evidence for shared mechanisms. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20 (9), 1118-24 PMID: 19686296Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Fear Really Does Have A Smell
People often talk with some drama about the smell of fear, and yet who among us could describe what the odour is like? This vagueness seems to support the idea that fear as a smell is metaphorical - a way raconteurs through the ages have conveyed the...
- Inside The Brains Of Men And Women Controlling Their Emotions
Women do seem to cry more readily than men, but is that because they are less able to control their emotions? According to Ute Habel and colleagues, research does suggest women are more 'emotional'. They cite the fact that women are more vulnerable...
- Humans Don't Smell That Bad
Watch any dog sniffing its way down the street and it’s obvious they’re expert at localising smells. They seem to know which direction a smell is coming from, much as we do with sounds and, of course, sights. We can certainly tell where a smell is...
- Anosmia
Tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a short piece written by someone who lost her sense of smell and her effort to try to find it once again:Something's Off By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG 17 October 2004 The New York Times [Snip] ...
- Stop And Smell The Coffee?
The Sept. 24, 2005 issue of New Scientist has an article about anosmia, the loss of one's sense of smell. It's a first-person account of losing the sense of smell after a viral infection, as well as a hopeful but untested treatment under cognitive...