Chemosignals of Stress Influence Social Judgments

Abstract

Human body odors have important communicative functions regarding genetic identity, immune fitness and general health, but an expanding body of research suggests they can also communicate information about an individual’s emotional state. In the current study, we tested whether axillary odors obtained from women experiencing psychosocial stress could negatively influence personality judgments of warmth and competence made about other women depicted in video scenarios. 44 female donors provided three types of sweat samples: untreated exercise sweat, untreated stress sweat and treated stress sweat. After a ‘washout’ period, a commercial unscented anti-perspirant product was applied to the left axilla only to evaluate whether ‘blocking’ the stress signal would improve the social evaluations. A separate group of male and female evaluators (n = 120) rated the women in the videos while smelling one of the three types of sweat samples. Women in the video scenes were rated as being more stressed by both men and women when smelling the untreated vs. treated stress sweat. For men only, the women in the videos were rated as less confident, trustworthy and competent when smelling both the untreated stress and exercise sweat in contrast to the treated stress sweat. Women’s social judgments were unaffected by sniffing the pads. The results have implications for influencing multiple types of professional and personal social interactions and impression management and extend our understanding of the social communicative function of body odors.

The Influence of Menstrual Cycle and Androstadienone on Female Stress Reactions: An fMRI Study

“…ML-females could be more attuned to social evaluative threat. Previously, Dalton et al (2012) indicated that men rated females as less competent and more stressed when the same female’s stress sweat was applied to the male rater in a video observation task. Our novel findings of the interaction between social chemosensory signals and menstrual cycle extend the previously observed complex social behavior outcome: ML-females in the current study were susceptible to negative bias as they attended to psychosocial stressors, this effect was stronger than in EF-females.…”

Chemosensory Communication of Gender Information: Masculinity Bias in Body Odor Perception and Femininity Bias Introduced by Chemosignals During Social Perception

“…Male and female superdonor pools were created to assure homogeneous odor samples within the experimental groups and to reduce effects of individual variations. This method has been successfully used in prior donation studies ( Albrecht et al, 2011 ; Dalton et al, 2013 ), which utilized large donor sample groups. Control samples of odorless clean cotton pads (no odor samples without chemosignals) were created and treated like the chemosensory samples in terms of cutting and freezing.…”

Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence that Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal

“…This procedure was used because general physical arousal can produce similar endocrinological reactions as sexual arousal (e.g., elevated testosterone; Zitzmann & Nieschlag, 2001). Thus, including the exercise task helped to ensure that sexual arousal, rather than general physical arousal, would be the key difference between the two conditions (Dalton, Mauté, Jaén, & Wilson, 2013;Mujica-Parodi et al, 2009;Zernecke et al, 2011). After the women cycled for 3 min, they were seated in front of a 17-inch computer screen and watched a video for 20 min.…”