Your Partner Can Smell Your Emotion

Love And Romance

oi-Suparna Chakaraborthy

By Suparna Chakaraborthy

Wednesday, June 2, 2010, 15:49

According to a new study couples can smell each others feelings of fear, happiness and sexual arousal.

"Familiarity with a partner enhances detection of emotional cues in that person"s smell," Rice University psychologist Denise Chen told.

This has been revealed after an experiment done by Chen and her team. They had an experiment on 20 couples who were in a live in relationship since past one and seven years.

The volunteers were shown videos which were meant to induce self-reported feelings of happiness, fear and sexual arousal and neutral videos. Underarm pads collected their sweat.

Then the participants were asked to smell the odor collected in jars.One jar held sweat that was collected during a video meant to induce particular emotions. The other jars contained perspiration that had been collected during a neutral video.

The study concluded that, nearly two-thirds of the time, participants could pick up the specific emotions from their partner"s body odor, and couples who"d lived together the longest were best at homing in on each other"s emotional odors.

The study also claims that couples can not only smell emotions but can also smell their partner if they are around. This sensitivity towards each other builds up with the due course of time.