Losing stinks! The effect of competition outcome on body odour quality

Abstract

Dominance hierarchy is often established via repeated agonistic encounters where consistent winners are considered dominant. Human body odour contains cues to psychological dominance and competition, but it is not known whether competition outcome (a marker of a change in dominance hierarchy) affects the hedonic quality of human axillary odour. Therefore, we investigated the effect of winning and losing on odour quality. We collected odour samples from Mixed Martial Arts fighters approximately 1 h before and immediately after a match. Raters then assessed samples for pleasantness, attractiveness, masculinity and intensity. We also obtained data on donors' affective state and cortisol and testosterone levels, since these are known to be associated with competition and body odour quality. Perceived body odour pleasantness, attractiveness and intensity significantly decreased while masculinity increased after a match irrespective of the outcome. Nonetheless, losing a match affected the pleasantness of body odour more profoundly, though bordering formal level of significance. Moreover, a path analysis revealed that match loss led to a decrease in odour attractiveness, which was mediated by participants’ negative affective states. Our study suggests that physical competition and to some extent also its outcome affect the perceived quality of human body odour in specific real-life settings, thus providing cues to dominance-related characteristics. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Olfactory communication in humans’.

Cross-modal associations of human body odour attractiveness with facial and vocal attractiveness provide little support for the backup signals hypothesis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…To assess whether the number of ratings for each stimulus type within Studies 1-7, 9, 10 and part of Study 8 provided stable estimates, we calculated the point of stability (POS, a point at which means do not substantially change with additional observations) within a corridor of stability of a mean (COS) (Hehman, Xie, Ofosu, & Nespoli, 2018;Schönbrodt & Perugini, 2013) in R x64 (R Core Team, and Team, 2019) via RStudio (R Core Team, 2021). We used the settings following Hehman et al ( 2018): for the 1-7 scale (Studies 1-4, 7, 9), the POS was specified as 95% CI of observed values falling within ±0.5 points (approximately 14%) (Fialová et al, 2020), for the 9-point scale (Study 5, − 4 to +4 scale used for odour ratings) within ±0.6 points (~ 14%), for the 0-1000 scale (Study 6) we set POS at 95% CI within ±70 points (~ 14%), for the 1-10 scale (Study 8, the replication sample) we set POS 2 Another approach is to use bias-corrected correlations. In the main paper, we report results using the Fisher's r-to-z transforms.…”

Olfaction in the Multisensory Processing of Faces: A Narrative Review of the Influence of Human Body Odors

“…These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and future studies should further examine to what extent emotional body odors -aside from fear, stress, or anxiety odors -hold the ability to influence social perception based on vision (or audition, or touch). Recent promising findings suggest that this area of research is beginning to be scrutinized, with emerging investigations of body odors related to aggression (Pause et al, 2020), sexual arousal (Wisman and Shrira, 2020), dominance/competition (Fialová et al, 2020), or happiness (Smeets et al, 2020). Another line of research could involve investigations on how anosmic individuals process facial cues in comparison to normosmic individuals in both visual only and olfactory-visual contexts.…”

Human olfactory communication: current challenges and future prospects

“…The paper by Fialová et al [94] follows neatly on that by Pause et al [93] by investigating the odour of winning and losing fighters in mixed martial arts contests, arguably the most aggressive sport in existence. Odours were sampled from fighters about 1 h before and after a contest, and subsequently rated by unfamiliar individuals on several hedonic scales.…”