
If You Can't Smell Him, Can You Love Him? - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/blog/if-you-cant-smell-him-can-you-love-him
======
nkrisc
I can't find the source, but I read about a study done with women where they
smelled sweaty shirts from unrelated men or their brothers or fathers. Across
the board they rated the shirts from their blood relatives as smelling worse
than the others. The theory was that people with different genetics have
different makeups of microbes living on their skin, making them smell
different than you.

I like the way my wife smells, and we certainly share no relatives for many,
many generations.

~~~
losty
I'm curious if there is a similar relationship with farts. I find those of my
family particularly unpleasant.

~~~
pboutros
I, for one, would fund this study, if only for the joy of knowing that it is
occurring.

------
Geekette
I think the concept of “emotional contagion” is a _stretch_. I simply do not
believe that empirically[1], people who smell sweat excreted by frightened
people will also feel fear. Disgust as general reaction to all sweat samples
is more believable because sweat is generally viewed as an unpleasant smell.

The notion that you are lacking an entire layer of communication when you do
not have a sense of smell is also subjective, especially when it comes to
those born without it; you can't miss what you don't know. Also other senses
tend to compensate, i.e. when some blind people report heightened sense of
hearing.

[1] Lack of discussion of sample size makes me think it wasn't representative
in size or demographics.

~~~
ASpring
You should at least do cursory research before dismissing an idea entirely.

Start with these and look at refs:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005987)

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guen_Semin/publication/...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guen_Semin/publication/231225277_Chemosignals_Communicate_Human_Emotions/links/02e7e518215711d679000000.pdf)

~~~
pak
Geekette's concerns are really only validated by the references you give. They
have a sample size of 28 and 36 smell recipients, respectively (all likely
bored undergrads), which seems hardly representative of all cultures and human
behavioral contexts.

It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger
validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. And to
more rigorously interpret what was measured by these experiments, both studies
examined fear, which has a well-understood hormonal response (adrenaline,
etc.) that is already understood to affect sweat content [1], and one study
examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to
sweaty odor—enough that this would seem to be a unremarkable emotion to claim
was "communicated".

Concluding that humans may communicate _other_ more complex emotions (love,
hate, sarcasm, uncertainty, trust, whatever) through sweat is what
neurobehavioral scientists love to _imply_ via these preliminary studies and
have puffed up by the downstream media, but they are just that: only
preliminary.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating)

~~~
ASpring
You bring up sample size here which doesn't really matter because the effect
is statistically significant. Your point about the populations being
unrepresentative is of course a good point(which can be made about nearly any
study, low hanging fruit for criticism) but represents a grave
misunderstanding of how science actually happens in the real world. It's
absurd to think that you should recruit a representative sample of the entire
world to do a preliminary study. Validate on a more convenient sample and
expand otherwise it's wasted money and effort.

>It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger
validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested.

There is no support for this besides your opinions and naive priors.

>one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default
reaction to sweaty odor

Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control
group inhaling normal sweat without producing an effect.

~~~
pak
The problem is you're arguing against a totally different position than where
Geekette and myself are coming from. Let's go back to the first lines of the
OP: "What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication?
Compromise? How about a sense of smell?" ... followed by the statement by
Dalton that "Smell is important in social bonding." That last statement there
is an extremely _broad_ , confident statement (consider how complicated social
bonding is), and it's explained by Dalton with this "emotional contagion"
idea.

Two studies that show statistically significant effects for a total of ~60
people smelling odors from two different conditions (fear and disgust) is not
nearly enough evidence to back up an assertion as broad as "smell is important
in social bonding," nor that a substantial range of emotions spread via odors
(contagion). At best, these two studies are suggestive, at worst they are so
flawed as to not lend any evidentiary value. "Statistical significance" is not
a substitute for critical thought on how much evidence stands for and against
the hypothesis (meta-analysis). If I set up two experiments that showed that
gravity doesn't exist, p=0.04 for both, would you set aside the totality of
the evidence saying it does? Perhaps you would criticize my methods, or the
link from my results to my conclusions, no?

You set up a strawman by saying that I'm asking the impossible—that large-
scale behavioral cohorts must be assembled for preliminary studies. I'm not.
I'm simply expecting some honesty in how people report the conclusions of
preliminary studies.

 _> Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a
control group inhaling normal sweat_

You are incorrect, probably because you did not read past the abstract.
Perhaps you should be more careful about telling people how science works in
the real world or whatever, because real scientific discussion involves
reading methods sections. In the APS paper contrasting fear vs. disgust vs.
control, the control condition contained _unused compresses,_ i.e., no sweat
at all. From the horse's mouth: "unused absorbent compresses [...] in our view
constitute optimal control stimuli because other nonemotional bodily
secretions (e.g., sweat from playing sports) can potentially contain other
chemosignals."

So... I am supposed to believe that when recipients smelled sweat from the
donors watching disgusting videos, compared to _no sweat_ , feeling disgusted
at the sweaty odor is some kind of "emotional connection" to how disgusted the
donor felt while sweating? Give me a break—this is a sham negative control.
The huge confounder, as Geekette rightly points out, is that many people are
normally disgusted by any sweaty odor.

------
sixhobbits
"In experiments, volunteers who sniffed sweat samples from people experiencing
certain feelings, such as fear or disgust, felt those emotions themselves.
When volunteers smelled the odor of disgusted people, their lips curled just
as they do when smelling something disgusting, says Dalton"

Interesting article. I'm curious as to how much reliable research has been
done into contagious emotions. It sounds a bit farfetched the way they
describe it in the quote above. The idea is talked about in a Live Science
article too [0], but also not much detail is given. I haven't read much about
it, but it sounds like one of those single paper non-reproduced ideas that's
interesting enough on its own for people to keep talking about it. Does anyone
who knows more about this than me have other opinions?

[0] [http://m.livescience.com/24578-humans-smell-
fear.html](http://m.livescience.com/24578-humans-smell-fear.html)

~~~
PepeGomez
I would like to know how well it works with autistic people.

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ondeodiff
There's been plenty of research on the role olfactory sense play on sexual
attraction. It's totally not surprising. If you look at the animal kingdom,
scent is a key detector for ovulaton cycles, etc. Here's an old one from NIH
..[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885393/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1885393/)

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PepeGomez
Is there any research into how well this works in Autistic people, especially
aspergers? Maybe the problem is the lack of ability to smell emotion and
people missing this feedback are unable to learn how to spot emotions through
other means.

~~~
nibs
If this were true, people without autism would not be able to apply theory of
mind to actors on TV and in movies. Because people with autism lack theory of
mind towards others in real life and in media, and those without it have it in
both, smell cannot be related. It could play a small role, though.

~~~
PepeGomez
Don't people with Aspergers lack the ability to understand other people's
emotions, rather than lacking theory of mind completely?

It's not just the ability itslf, it's the training it provides. Normal
children get a near immediate feedback if they guessed emotions correctly.
It's like having somebody with you 24/7 telling you how the people around you
feel. Those without the ability don't have that luxury.

~~~
nibs
For my brother and father it is more like they understand emotions in
themselves, and that other people feel emotions similarly, but have trouble
identifying them or why they are happening in others because it is harder to
take another person's perspective.

Once they know that the person is upset, they empathize and feel bad, so they
can in fact understand the person, but they could not guess that there was a
problem withoute explicitly spelling it out, and could not derive it from any
non-verbal cues.

~~~
PepeGomez
Which is exactly what I was talking about.

------
DanBC
Here's a BBC Radio Four programme about various forms of anosmia. It includes
a woman who can't smell her partner, and she misses that, and realises that
smell is often mentioned by bereaved people as being a powerful trigger for
memories.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076cg3n](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076cg3n)

(I have no idea what bits of the BBC are geo-blocked. Sorry if this isn't
available.)

------
aaron695
Another reason why the bullshit about working remotely is 'great' is not that
simple.

Smell is an important part of the workplace.

So is touch and 3d vision.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Remote working turns out fine. Done it for 20 years. Make good money. So this
'bullshit' is pretty good stuff.

~~~
aaron695
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Made $36 Million -
[http://www.techtimes.com/articles/155005/20160430/yahoo-
ceo-...](http://www.techtimes.com/articles/155005/20160430/yahoo-ceo-marissa-
mayer-made-36-million-last-year-despite-6-million-pay-cut.htm)

Not saying it's impossible to hack life. Things that don't necessarily make
sense, still exist. Just saying some things fight the natural flow.

Understanding why remote work is hard, will allow you to hack it better.

~~~
nedwin
Are you using Yahoo and Marissa Mayer as an example of counter-point to remote
work?

