What's That Smell? (Part Three)

How do I smell thee? Let me count the ways....

One fascinating area of perceptual research involves the ways in which human being communicate (often subliminally) through the olfactory sense.

That old adage about dogs being able to "smell fear" on us? True. But did you know that humans can also recognize the smell of fear? And of happiness.

A couple of researchers at Rice University in Texas conducted a neat study to prove this: (Chan and Haviland-Jones, 2000).

They asked a group of male and female college students to watch portions of happy and frightening movies, while wearing gauze pads under their armpits. This allowed the researchers to collect samples of Male Happy Sweat, Male Fear Sweat, Female Happy Sweat, and Female Fear Sweat.

When we experience emotions, it changes the biochemical composition of our sweat--when we're afraid, we emit different protein molecules than when we are happy.

Once they had their sweat samples, the researchers recruited a different group of students--male and female--to sniff each sample and try to identify it.

(You gotta love those college students...they'll try anything!)

The results? People were surprisingly good at being able to "sniff out" these differences.

1) The most easily identified scent was Male Fear Sweat. Both male and female "receivers" picked this one up right away.

2) Female "receivers" were equally skillful at identifying happy scents from both male and female donors.

3) Male "receivers" were better at recognizing happy females than frightened females.

Part of our "Intuition" of emotions...particularly female intuition, comes from our ability to a) detect and b) identify chemical differences in the composition of our sweat.

Females (in general) tend to test better on skills of olfactory perception. They're more sensitive and responsive to scents. (This could explain why my wife brought home a package of scented razors not long ago...Marketers are not dummies.) And when you consider how closely the olfaction system is tied to the emotions, this makes sense (scents?).

For Writers to consider:

1) You could show animals in your story identifying and responding to human emotions.
2) Since olfaction is typically secondary to vision in humans, it might be interesting to portray a character (or even a whole race, if you write Sci-Fi) who rely more on smells than the normal human.
3) Science is full of fun, quirky experiments. Consider involving one of your characters in an experiment as a minor/major part of the plot. Michael Gruber's novel The Forgery of Venus, is a good example. When the protagonist (a painter) takes an experimental drug to enhance his creativity, it has unexpected consequences.
4) When describing fear and terror, don't forget the sense of smell. One of Flannery O'Connor's short stories (Wildcat) makes great use of this. The protagonist is blind...and the tension builds as man and animal become aware of each others presence largely through smell.

references: Rachel Herz, 2007; The Scent of Desire (William Morrow)

Chan, D, and Haviland-Jones, J. (2000) Human Olfactory Communication of Emotion. Perception and Motor Skills, 91, 771-781