Can you smell if someone’s happy?

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: May 27, 2015 Last Edited: May 27, 2015

Emily Bills

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Could you walk into a football team’s locker room after a big game and tell if they won based on smell alone? According to a new study, you can.

Published in the journal Psychological Science, the study found that feelings of happiness produce chemical changes in our sweat that can then be picked up by our olfactory system.

“Human sweat produced when a person is happy induces a state similar to happiness in somebody who inhales this odor,” study author Gun Semin, a psychology research professor at the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada in Portugal, told HealthDay.

How the study worked

In the study, researchers collected sweat samples from 12 young men after each was shown videos intended to induce a range of emotions, including joy and fear. All the men were healthy, drug-free, and non-smokers. Participants neither consumed smelly foods nor engaged in sexual activity throughout the study period.

The study team also had 36 similar young women smell the samples while their reactions were monitored. Researchers said they chose only women to smell the sweat because women normally have a better sense of smell than men and tend to be more responsive to emotional signaling.

The team analyzed the facial expressions of the smell group to determine a so-called “behavioral synchronization” between a man’s emotional state, his sweat and the reaction of the person who smells that sweat. Notably, the female participants who smelled “happy sweat” exhibited facial muscle activity linked to happiness, the study team said.

The research also found that the emotion ‘contained’ in the sweat wasn’t contagious. For example, women who said they had a “pleasant” reaction to a sweat sample did not show it in their facial expressions.

While past research has revealed a similar phenomenon with respect to fear or other ‘negative’ emotions, Semin said, “we have not demonstrated what the nature of the chemical compound is in sweat.”

Andreas Keller, a researcher at The Rockefeller University in New York City, told HealthDay the study findings make sense intuitively.

“Hearing happy people and seeing happy people makes you happier,” he said, “so the fact that smelling them would make you happier, too, is probably not so surprising.”

He added that the next step “would be to find out what the chemical difference in fear sweat and happy sweat is that mediates these effects. This would open the door to study what is going on at a mechanistic level.”

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