Abstract
Body odors (BOs) can convey social information. In particular, their effects are maximal when their presence is paired with meaningful social contexts. Static faces have been widely used as social stimuli. However, they miss a key feature of our phenomenological experience, characterized by multisensory dynamic stimulations. Here, we investigate how BO sampled from individuals experiencing a transitory anxiety state, (a) induce a stress response and (b) bias the recognition of dynamic facial expressions, compared with BO of relaxed individuals. Participants (n=46) categorized the emotion of a face, morphing from a neutral expression to either an angry or happy expression, during exposure to either BO condition. In addition, their cardiac activity was measured. Exposure to anxiety BO increased the accuracy of dynamic facial recognition and reduced cardiac parasympathetic activity. These results suggest that in social situations that simulate part of the multisensory and dynamic features of real-life social contexts, anxiety BOs will induce a stress response in recipients, modulating both arousal and cognitive-emotional skills but facilitating emotional facial processing.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
