Like previous pandemics, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has direct and indirect effects, including in mental health. To evaluate the immediate psychological impact of COVID-19, we conducted an online survey in Portugal (24-27 March 2020), using the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21). From the 10,529 participants (M = 31.33; SD = 9.73), 83.4% were women, had a mean age of 31.2 years, and 70.9% were active workers. Depression, anxiety, and stress were rated as moderate to severe in 11.7%, 16.9%, and 5.6% of the sample, respectively. Moreover, 49.2% of participants reported a moderate or severe psychological impact of the outbreak. Women, the unemployed, those with lower education, living in rural areas, and with flu-like symptoms or chronic disorders were risk factors. Further research is needed to identify vulnerable groups to better inform and adapt mental health policies and interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has become one of the main international concerns regarding its impact on mental health. The present study aims to investigate the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms, and behavioral aspects amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in a Brazilian population. An online survey was administered from May 22 to June 5, 2020 using a questionnaire comprising of sociodemographic information, the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS-21), and the Coping Strategies Inventory. Participants comprised 3,000 people from Brazil’s 26 states and the Federal District, with an average age of 39.8 years, women (83%), married (50.6%), graduates (70.1%) and employees (46.7%). Some contracted the virus (6.4%) and had dead friends or relatives (22.7%). There was more consumption of drugs, tobacco, medication, and food (40.8%). Almost half of participants expressed symptoms of depression (46.4%), anxiety (39.7%), and stress (42.2%). These were higher in women, people without children, students, patients with chronic diseases, and people who had contact with others diagnosed with COVID-19. The existence of a group more vulnerable to situations with a high stress burden requires greater attention regarding mental health during and after the pandemic. That said, it should be emphasized that these findings are preliminary and portray a moment still being faced by many people amid the pandemic and quarantine measures. Therefore, we understand that the magnitude of the impacts on mental health will only be more specific with continuous studies after total relaxation of the quarantine.

Every individual has a unique body odor (BO), similar to a fingerprint. In forensic research, identification of culprit BOs has been performed by trained dogs, but not by humans. We introduce the concept of nosewitness identification and present the first experimental results on BO memory in witness situations involving violent crimes. Two experiments indicated that BO associated with male characters in authentic videos could later be identified in BO lineup tests well above chance. Moreover, culprit BO in emotional crime videos could be identified considerably better than the BO of a male person in neutral videos. This indicates that nosewitness identification benefits from emotional encoding. Altogether, the study testifies to the virtue of body odor as a cue to identify individuals observed under negative emotion.

Many studies have indicated that the chemical cues from body odors (BOs) of donors experiencing negative emotions can influence the psychophysiological and behavioral response of the observers. However, these olfactory cues have been used mainly as contextual information for processing visual stimuli. Here, for the first time, we evaluate how emotional BO affects the emotional tone of a subsequent BO message. Axillary sweat samples were taken from 20 donors in 3 separate sessions while they watched fear, disgust, or neutral videos. In a double-blind experiment, we assessed the cardiac and subjective responses from 69 participants who were either exposed to negative emotional or neutral BOs. Our results showed a reduced cardiac parasympathetic activity (HF%)-indicating increased stress-when participants smelled the emotional BOs before the neutral BOs, compared to when they smelled neutral followed by emotional BOs. The intensity of the neutral odor also increased following the exposure to both negative BOs. These findings indicate that BOs contain an emotion-dependent chemical cue that affects the perceiver both at the physiological and subjective levels.