Women can smell fear

[Evilvalle]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scien...wimp.html#

Women can smell a wimp
Women can sniff out a wimp because they can smell emotions like fear and disgust on a man's skin, according to a study.

The smell of perspiration released by men while they were feeling afraid or repulsed was enough to trigger the same emotion in women, an experiment showed.

When exposed to bottled sweat given off by men as they watched clips from the thriller "The Shining", women began showing physical signs of being afraid such as a fearful facial expression, darting eye movements and heavier sniffing.

In contrast, the smell of perspiration from men who had been watching MTV's Jackass – which features stomach-churning stunts – caused a disgusted facial expression and other signs of the emotion including a reduction in eye movement and sniffing.

The findings suggest that certain emotions can be contagious and can be detected via chemical signals, even though the women were not aware of it at the time, researchers said.
The system most likely evolved as an unconscious form of communication, where fear could be spread between people to warn them of imminent danger, and disgust could be shared to highlight the risks of toxic chemicals.



Researchers chose to study the effect of men's sweat on women because men have been shown to release more chemical signals when they perspire, while women are more sensitive to the signals.

Dr Gün Semin of Utrecht University, who led the study, said: "These findings are important because they contradict the common assumption that human communication occurs exclusively through language and visual cues.
"Importantly, the women were not aware of these effects and there was no relationship between the effects observed and how pleasant or intense the women judged the stimuli to be."

The findings may explain the "emotional contagion" which is known to spread among heavy crowds, he added.
Further studies could help establish whether other emotions like happiness or anger, which are less directly related to survival, are equally contagious.
For their experiment, researchers recruited 10 men and taped absorbent pads under their armpits while they watched 25-minute videos taken from The Shining and Jackass, on separate occasions.

The pads were chopped up and placed in bottles, with each bottle containing samples from four men collected under either the "fear" condition or the "disgust" condition.

When the women, who had not been told where the samples came from, were exposed to "fear" sweat they opened their eyes more widely – an expression of fear.

In contrast, the "disgust" condition prompted them to adopt a corresponding facial expression by lowering their eyebrows and wrinkling their noses.

The effects also applied to "sensory acquisition" behaviour, which naturally occurs when we are afraid but is suppressed when we are disgusted.

In the "fear" condition women sniffed more deeply and scanned the room with their eyes more – an evolutionary response designed to help to detect danger.

The "disgust" scent had the opposite effect, causing the women to wrinkle their noses and lower their eyebrows, which in nature would help limit exposure to noxious chemicals.