de Groot Jasper H B, Smeets Monique A M, Semin Gün R
Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Department of Psychology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey; Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA), Instituto Universitário, Lisbon, Portugal.
PLoS One. 2015 Feb 27;10(2):e0118211. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118211. eCollection 2015.
Humans can register another person's fear not only with their eyes and ears, but also with their nose. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to body odors from fearful individuals elicited implicit fear in others. The odor of fearful individuals appears to have a distinctive signature that can be produced relatively rapidly, driven by a physiological mechanism that has remained unexplored in earlier research. The apocrine sweat glands in the armpit that are responsible for chemosignal production contain receptors for adrenalin. We therefore expected that the release of adrenalin through activation of the rapid stress response system (i.e., the sympathetic-adrenal medullary system) is what drives the release of fear sweat, as opposed to activation of the slower stress response system (i.e., hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis). To test this assumption, sweat was sampled while eight participants prepared for a speech. Participants had higher heart rates and produced more armpit sweat in the fast stress condition, compared to baseline and the slow stress condition. Importantly, exposure to sweat from participants in the fast stress condition induced in receivers (N = 31) a simulacrum of the state of the sender, evidenced by the emergence of a fearful facial expression (facial electromyography) and vigilant behavior (i.e., faster classification of emotional facial expressions).
人类不仅可以通过眼睛和耳朵感知他人的恐惧，还能通过鼻子察觉到。先前的研究表明，接触恐惧个体的体味会引发他人的隐性恐惧。恐惧个体的气味似乎有一种独特的特征，这种特征能相对快速地产生，由一种在早期研究中尚未被探索的生理机制驱动。腋窝处负责产生化学信号的顶泌汗腺含有肾上腺素受体。因此，我们推测通过激活快速应激反应系统（即交感 - 肾上腺髓质系统）释放肾上腺素，才是促使恐惧汗液分泌的原因，而非激活较慢的应激反应系统（即下丘脑 - 垂体 - 肾上腺轴）。为了验证这一假设，在八名参与者准备演讲时采集了他们的汗液样本。与基线和慢应激状态相比，在快速应激状态下参与者的心率更高，腋窝出汗更多。重要的是，接收者（N = 31）接触快速应激状态下参与者的汗液后，会出现类似发送者状态的表现，如恐惧的面部表情（面部肌电图）和警觉行为（即更快地对情绪化面部表情进行分类）得以证明。
