Social cognition
Does smelling anxiety change how we feel when left out?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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fMRI can reveal significant differences in brain activation patterns during social experiences, such as social exclusion, even when participants' behavioral self-reports show no differences.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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