If You Can't Smell Him, Can You Love Him?
nautil.us
nautil.us
I like the way my wife smells, and we certainly share no relatives for many, many generations.
"Third Cousins Have Greatest Number Of Offspring, Data From Iceland Shows"
Because some of studies (of smell) contradict with others (on fertility).
The notion that you are lacking an entire layer of communication when you do not have a sense of smell is also subjective, especially when it comes to those born without it; you can't miss what you don't know. Also other senses tend to compensate, i.e. when some blind people report heightened sense of hearing.
[1] Lack of discussion of sample size makes me think it wasn't representative in size or demographics.
Start with these and look at refs:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guen_Semin/publication/...
EDIT
On skimming the links you gave, I find that the samples and the researchers' conclusion in each study do not constitute representative samples and empirical evidence for this “emotional contagion” theory, respectively. Both studies also focused on only 1-2 types of emotion (fear, anxiety), which cannot be extrapolated to all emotions.
APS published study: Sweat from 10 males + reactions from 36 females.
PLOS published study: Sweat from 49 people (28 males 21 females between 20–37, European origin) + reactions from 28 people (14 males and 14 females between 19–30 years).
See reply to pak wrt to sample size.
"Support" does not mean "prove". How can you say it doesn't support the idea of emotional contagion when the studies indicate an effect for at least two emotions. Is there more work to be done? Definitely. But these are first steps.
It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. And to more rigorously interpret what was measured by these experiments, both studies examined fear, which has a well-understood hormonal response (adrenaline, etc.) that is already understood to affect sweat content [1], and one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor—enough that this would seem to be a unremarkable emotion to claim was "communicated".
Concluding that humans may communicate other more complex emotions (love, hate, sarcasm, uncertainty, trust, whatever) through sweat is what neurobehavioral scientists love to imply via these preliminary studies and have puffed up by the downstream media, but they are just that: only preliminary.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating
>It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested.
There is no support for this besides your opinions and naive priors.
>one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor
Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat without producing an effect.
Two studies that show statistically significant effects for a total of ~60 people smelling odors from two different conditions (fear and disgust) is not nearly enough evidence to back up an assertion as broad as "smell is important in social bonding," nor that a substantial range of emotions spread via odors (contagion). At best, these two studies are suggestive, at worst they are so flawed as to not lend any evidentiary value. "Statistical significance" is not a substitute for critical thought on how much evidence stands for and against the hypothesis (meta-analysis). If I set up two experiments that showed that gravity doesn't exist, p=0.04 for both, would you set aside the totality of the evidence saying it does? Perhaps you would criticize my methods, or the link from my results to my conclusions, no?
You set up a strawman by saying that I'm asking the impossible—that large-scale behavioral cohorts must be assembled for preliminary studies. I'm not. I'm simply expecting some honesty in how people report the conclusions of preliminary studies.
>Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat
You are incorrect, probably because you did not read past the abstract. Perhaps you should be more careful about telling people how science works in the real world or whatever, because real scientific discussion involves reading methods sections. In the APS paper contrasting fear vs. disgust vs. control, the control condition contained unused compresses, i.e., no sweat at all. From the horse's mouth: "unused absorbent compresses [...] in our view constitute optimal control stimuli because other nonemotional bodily secretions (e.g., sweat from playing sports) can potentially contain other chemosignals."
So... I am supposed to believe that when recipients smelled sweat from the donors watching disgusting videos, compared to no sweat, feeling disgusted at the sweaty odor is some kind of "emotional connection" to how disgusted the donor felt while sweating? Give me a break—this is a sham negative control. The huge confounder, as Geekette rightly points out, is that many people are normally disgusted by any sweaty odor.
Stale sweat is usually described as horrible. But there are many references to people liking the smell of fresh sweat - see a lot of fanfic for examples.
Sweat is mentioned 4 times on this page: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/07/08/18-more-manly-smell...
and about 8 times on this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskWomen/comments/1g19dd/women_of_r...
There is also a difference between those liking smell of sweat from the sex they're attracted to and men citing it as a "manly" thing, influenced in no small part by cultural and pop culture messaging.
Interesting article. I'm curious as to how much reliable research has been done into contagious emotions. It sounds a bit farfetched the way they describe it in the quote above. The idea is talked about in a Live Science article too [0], but also not much detail is given. I haven't read much about it, but it sounds like one of those single paper non-reproduced ideas that's interesting enough on its own for people to keep talking about it. Does anyone who knows more about this than me have other opinions?
It's not just the ability itslf, it's the training it provides. Normal children get a near immediate feedback if they guessed emotions correctly. It's like having somebody with you 24/7 telling you how the people around you feel. Those without the ability don't have that luxury.
Once they know that the person is upset, they empathize and feel bad, so they can in fact understand the person, but they could not guess that there was a problem withoute explicitly spelling it out, and could not derive it from any non-verbal cues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b076cg3n
(I have no idea what bits of the BBC are geo-blocked. Sorry if this isn't available.)
Smell is an important part of the workplace.
So is touch and 3d vision.
Work is not about being robots.
It's very strongly tied to human interactions. Which, as these studies show includes smell.
Which is not available online.
The customer rated the employee higher if touch was involved.
So in the real world, it helps.
You can be an employee as you see fit. Just talking about the science.
A colleague better not be touching me unless they were performing some sort of life saving measure.
Not saying it's impossible to hack life. Things that don't necessarily make sense, still exist. Just saying some things fight the natural flow.
Understanding why remote work is hard, will allow you to hack it better.