There’s a whiff of truth in the ‘smell of fear’: Detecting scary situations helps us …

Study finds that we express more fear when exposed to the odour of someone else who is scared

By
Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED:

00:21 GMT, 10 August 2013

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UPDATED:

00:21 GMT, 10 August 2013

People really can smell fear, and it makes us more aware of a threat.

Dutch psychologists have found that smelling the odour of someone who is scared triggers unconscious activity in the brain, leading the sniffer to show fearful facial expressions.

In the study, by the University of Utrecht, 30 women watched videos of a woman either chatting to a man or being assaulted by a man.

Women generally have better sense of smell than men, says the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Terror: Women who smell the odour of scared people show more fear

They were exposed to odours collected from the armpits of men who had been watching either a nature documentary or a scary film.

The women could not consciously distinguish between the neutral odour and the ‘smell of fear’.

But the latter led them to show fear – even if they were watching a neutral video clip.

Watching a scary clip with a neutral smell led to similar intensity of fearful expressions, rather than anything worse.

Finally, when women watched a scary clip as they were exposed to the smell of fear, the electrodes picked up the most intense fearful expressions.

Lead author Jasper de Groot, of the University of Utrecht, concluded that fear signals detected through smell are 'as potent as audiovisual fear signals in eliciting a fearful facial expression'.

And pulling a scared face is an important survival tactic because 'raising the eyebrows and upper eye-lids increases a person's visual field size' and triggers increased vigilance.

The authors wrote: 'These findings run counter to traditional views that human emotions are communicated exclusively via visual and linguistic channels.'