Does smelling anxiety change how we feel when left out?
Smelling another person's sweat collected during an anxious situation reduces brain activity in areas typically associated with social pain and mentalizing when a person is being excluded from a social game.
Source
Chemosensory anxiety cues moderate the experience of social exclusion - an fMRI investigation with Cyberball
What they did
Researchers collected sweat samples from 10 male donors either while they were waiting for an anxious oral exam or while they were exercising on a stationary bike. Next, 24 healthy participants (14 men and 10 women) smelled these sweat samples while playing "Cyberball," a virtual ball-tossing game, inside an fMRI scanner. The game included social inclusion and social exclusion conditions to see how the different sweat smells influenced brain activity and self-reported feelings of being left out.
What they found
While the control sweat (exercise) led to increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate during exclusion, smelling the anxiety sweat prevented this activation. Additionally, participants exposed to anxiety sweat showed significant deactivation in the hippocampus and the middle and superior temporal gyri during social exclusion. Despite these brain-level changes, participants reported feeling equally excluded on the behavioral Need-Threat scale regardless of which sweat they smelled.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study only examined 24 participants in the fMRI scanner, which is a small sample size that may not generalize broadly or allow for detecting subtle gender differences. Because the exclusion block always followed the inclusion block, the findings could be partially influenced by the participants' violated expectations of being included rather than pure social exclusion. Additionally, the lack of a non-social, non-human control odor makes it difficult to completely rule out general effects of novel or strong smells.
Key terms
- Cyberball
- A virtual ball-tossing game commonly used in psychology experiments to reliably manipulate and study the effects of social exclusion and inclusion.
- Chemosensory cues
- Chemical signals released by the body (such as in sweat) that can be detected by others' sense of smell and influence their physiology or behavior.
- Ostracism
- The act of excluding or ignoring an individual from a social group or activity.
- Normosmic
- Having a normal, healthy sense of smell.
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- A brain imaging technique that measures and maps brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow and oxygen levels.
- Volume of Interest (VOI)
- A specific, targeted region of the brain selected for detailed statistical analysis based on its hypothesized role in a cognitive task.
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Quiz yourself
Which physiological systems interact to release sweat containing chemical markers of anxiety or fear?
Common questions
Did the participants actually know they were smelling anxiety sweat?
No, the participants could not consciously tell the difference between the anxiety sweat and the exercise sweat, as ratings of pleasantness, intensity, and valence did not differ between the two.
Why did the researchers only collect sweat from male donors?
Sweat was collected only from males because the apocrine sweat glands in the male underarm area are physically larger, making it easier to gather robust sweat samples.
If their brains responded differently, why didn't participants report feeling different on the surveys?
It is common in neuroimaging studies to find physiological or neural differences that do not immediately translate to conscious, self-reported emotional changes, possibly because the psychological surveys are not sensitive enough or because the brain differences represent subconscious coping mechanisms.
What is the evolutionary explanation for why anxiety sweat would reduce brain responses to exclusion?
The authors suggest that smelling another person's anxiety acts as an "alarm" signal that prepares an individual to withdraw or detach from a potentially dangerous social situation, effectively damping down their emotional distress to focus on survival or coping.
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