Smelling other people’s body odour could provide a calming effect that helps with social anxiety, according to Swedish researchers.
Sound disgusting? Well, the science behind it claims that the smell of other people’s sweat activates brain pathways linked to emotions, offering a calming effect.
Researchers suggest that our body odour might communicate our emotional states like happiness or anxiety and even evoke similar responses in others who smell it.
As a part of the study, volunteers were asked to donate armpit sweat from when they were watching either a scary movie or a happy one.
48 women with social anxiety agreed to sniff some of these samples, alongside receiving conventional mindfulness therapy, where people are encouraged to be more aware of their thoughts, feelings, emotions and surroundings to reduce automatic responses.
Some of the women were given genuine body odour to sniff, while others were given clean air instead.
Those who were exposed to the sweat appeared to do better with the therapy.
‘Sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone who had been scared by a movie clip. So there may be something about human chemo-signals in sweat generally which affects the response to treatment,’ said lead researcher Elisa Vigna, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
‘It may be that simply being exposed to the presence of someone else has this effect, but we need to confirm this. In fact, that is what we are testing now in a follow-up study with a similar design, but where we are also including sweat from individuals watching emotionally neutral documentaries.’
The early findings of the study were presented at a medical conference in Paris this week.
There’s more research needed into the subject so your therapist might not be prescribing sniffing sweat anytime soon.
Smell is an important sense as it can alert us to danger like a gas leak, fire or rotten food. It is also closely linked with memory, that’s why some smells can evoke particular memories.
Additionally, smell also plays a role in the level of attraction between two people. Research has shown that our body odour, produced by the genes which make up our immune system, can help us subconsciously choose our partners.
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