Exposure to human odours, extracted from other people’s sweat, might be used to boost treatment for some mental health problems, a group of European researchers have shown.
In a preliminary study, the researchers were able to show that social anxiety was reduced when patients underwent mindfulness therapy while exposed to human "chemo-signals", or what is commonly referred to as body odour, obtained from underarm sweat from volunteers. Presenting the results of a pilot study at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris, lead researcher Elisa Vigna, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said our state of mind causes us to produce molecules (or chemo-signals) in sweat that communicate our emotional state and produce corresponding responses in the receivers.
"The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo-signals with mindfulness therapy seem to produce better results in treating social anxiety than can be achieved by mindfulness therapy alone".
Social anxiety is a common mental health condition where people worry excessively about participating in social situations. It can make work and other relationships difficult.
The study involved collecting sweat from volunteers, and then exposing patients to chemo-signals extracted from the samples, while they were being treated for social anxiety. The sweat samples were collected from volunteers who were watching short clips from movies. The films had been chosen to elicit particular emotional states such as fear or happiness — to see if the specific emotions experienced while perspiring had differing effects on the treatment. The clips included content from horror films such as The Grudge, and "happy" clips from Mr Bean’s Holiday, Sister Act and others.
Then 48 women, all of whom suffered from social anxiety, underwent mindfulness therapy for social anxiety. Divided into groups, they were exposed to different odours — while a control group was exposed to clean air.
"We found that the women in the group exposed to sweat from people who had been watching funny or fearful movies, responded better to mindfulness therapy than those who hadn’t been exposed.
"We were a little surprised to find that the emotional state of the person producing the sweat didn’t differ in treatment outcomes — sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone who had been scared by a movie clip. So there may be something about human chemo-signals in sweat generally which affects the response to treatment.
"It may be that simply being exposed to the presence of someone else has this effect, but we need to confirm this. In fact, that is what we are testing now in a follow-up study."
