The problem is you're arguing against a totally different position than where Geekette and myself are coming from. Let's go back to the first lines of the OP: "What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication? Compromise? How about a sense of smell?" ... followed by the statement by Dalton that "Smell is important in social bonding." That last statement there is an extremely broad, confident statement (consider how complicated social bonding is), and it's explained by Dalton with this "emotional contagion" idea.

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.