ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2006
The human brain is a detector of chemosensorily transmitted HLA-class I-similarity in same- and opposite-sex relations.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prejudice, Proxemic Space, and Social Odor: The Representation of the 'Outsider' Through an Evolutionary Metaverse Psychology Perspective.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- The scent of mating strategy: sociosexual orientation was associated with olfaction and body odor sniffing behavior in Chinese and American populations.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Past, Present, and Future of Human Chemical Communication Research.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Body odours as a chemosignal in the mother-child relationship: new insights based on an human leucocyte antigen-genotyped family cohort.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Pleasant body odours, but not genetic similarity, influence trustworthiness in a modified trust game.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- A predicted interaction between odour pleasantness and intensity provides evidence for major histocompatibility complex social signalling in women.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Processing of Body Odor Signals by the Human Brain.Chemosensory perception · 2012Article
- Does facial resemblance enhance cooperation?PloS one · 2012Article
- Mate preferences and infectious disease: theoretical considerations and evidence in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- Functional neuronal processing of human body odors.Vitamins and hormones · 2010Review
- Evidence for maternal-fetal genotype incompatibility as a risk factor for schizophrenia.Journal of biomedicine & biotechnology · 2010Review
- The neuronal substrates of human olfactory based kin recognition.Human brain mapping · 2009Article
- Towards a neuroscience of love: olfaction, attention and a model of neurohypophysial hormone action.Frontiers in evolutionary neuroscience · 2009Article
- Neural computations with mammalian infochemicals.Journal of chemical ecology · 2008Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Studies on subjective body odour ratings suggest that humans exhibit preferences for human leucocyte antigen (HLA)-dissimilar persons. However, with regard to the extreme polymorphism of the HLA gene loci, the behavioural impact of the proposed HLA-related attracting signals seems to be minimal. Furthermore, the role of HLA-related chemosignals in same- and opposite-sex relations in humans has not been specified so far. Here, we investigate subjective preferences and brain evoked responses to body odours in males and females as a function of HLA similarity between odour donor and smeller. We show that pre-attentive processing of body odours of HLA-similar donors is faster and that late evaluative processing of these chemosignals activates more neuronal resources than the processing of body odours of HLA-dissimilar donors. In same-sex smelling conditions, HLA-associated brain responses show a different local distribution in male (frontal) and female subjects (parietal). The electrophysiological results are supported by significant correlations between the odour ratings and the amplitudes of the brain potentials. We conclude that odours of HLA-similar persons function as important social warning signals in inter- and intrasexual human relations. Such HLA-related chemosignals may contribute to female and male mate choice as well as to male competitive behaviour.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.