CINTESIS.UA, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Life Sciences (IBILI), Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.
Chem Senses. 2018 May 23;43(5):347-355. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjy021.
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.
许多研究表明，经历负面情绪的捐献者的体臭（BO）所发出的化学信号可以影响观察者的生理和行为反应。然而，这些嗅觉线索主要被用作处理视觉刺激的背景信息。在这里，我们首次评估了情绪 BO 如何影响随后的 BO 信息的情绪基调。在 3 个单独的时段，从 20 名捐献者身上采集腋下汗液样本，同时让他们观看恐惧、厌恶或中性的视频。在一项双盲实验中，我们评估了 69 名参与者的心脏和主观反应，他们要么暴露于负面情绪 BO 要么暴露于中性 BO。我们的结果表明，与先闻中性 BO 后闻情绪 BO 相比，参与者在闻情绪 BO 之前的心脏副交感神经活动（HF%）降低，表明压力增加。中性气味的强度也在接触到两种负面 BO 后增加。这些发现表明，BO 中含有一种依赖于情绪的化学信号，它会在生理和主观层面上影响感知者。
