Unbelievable facts
People can smell fear and disgust, and these emotions are contagious, according to a new study.
According to a study by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, humans make connections not only through language and visual stimuli, but also through chemical signals, just like other animals.
Most animals communicate using their sense of smell, but since humans do not have the same sense of smell, experts believed that humans have long lost the ability to smell fear and other emotions .
Feelings of fear and anxiety have a smell
To find out, a team of scientists collected sweat samples from the armpits of 10 men while they watched scary scenes from the horror movie The Shining or repulsive clips from the MTV TV show Jackass.
The scientists then asked 36 women to take a visual test, during which they, without knowing it, inhaled the scents of male sweat.
When participants smelled the “scent of fear,” their eyes widened to take on a frightened expression, while those who smelled disgust also had a grimace of disgust. Women were chosen because previous studies have shown that women are more sensitive to men's scent than vice versa.
The study suggests that people transmit at least some emotions through smell, and this ability may be useful in a situation where a person is in crowded places people.
Psychology knows that people express emotions in a variety of ways, and some of them trigger sensory and behavioral responses that can save our lives.
For example, fear is an alert method and triggers signals that are related to survival, such as increased nasal breathing and rapid eye movements. This helps us identify possible danger signals in the environment.
In turn, feelings of disgust trigger reactions that indicate rejection of the object, such as sunken eyebrows and a wrinkled nose. Dutch scientists hope to expand existing knowledge about feelings by proving that chemical signals released during sweat contain emotional messages.