New study: Smelling other people's sweat helps with anxiety
Smelling other people's body odors may be useful in therapy for social anxiety, according to Swedish researchers who have begun tests with volunteers.
The scientists used armpit sweat in the experiments.
Study says social anxiety can be reduced using human 'chemo-signals'.
They think the smell activates brain pathways associated with emotion, leading to a calming effect – but it's too early to tell if they're right.
Some of the early findings will be presented at a medical conference in Paris.
Why and how do we smell?
Babies are born with a strong sense of smell, especially the mother and her milk.
Smell helps us detect danger – from food to smoke.
It helps us to communicate with the environment, but also with each other.
The dishes are tastier and evoke strong memories.
The aroma is detected by receptors in the upper part of the nose.
The signals are then sent directly to a specific part of the brain associated with memories and emotions.
Swedish research suggests that human body odor can communicate our emotional state – whether we're happy or upset, and even cause similar reactions in others who smell it.
The scientists asked volunteers to donate sweat from their armpits when they watched a scary or happy movie.
Forty-eight women with social anxiety agreed to sniff some of these samples while receiving a more conventional therapy called mindfulness.
This means that people are encouraged to focus on the present rather than repeating negative thoughts.
Some of the women were given real body odor to sniff, while others, the control group, smelled clean air.
Those who were exposed to sweat seemed to do better with the therapy.
"Sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone who was scared by a movie – maybe there's something about human chemosignals in sweat that affects the response to treatment at all."
"Perhaps exposure to something else has a similar effect, but we have to confirm that." This is what we will test in the next study with a similar design, but where we also included the sweat of individuals watching emotionally neutral documentaries," explained Elisa Viña, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead researcher on the project.