ArticlePloS one2015
Rapid stress system drives chemical transfer of fear from sender to receiver.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 23 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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
23 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- The scent of emotions: A systematic review of human intra- and interspecific chemical communication of emotions.Brain and behavior · 2020Pooled it
- A quasi-randomised pilot study on the efficacy and perceived usefulness of adding chemosignals to mindfulness practice for women with social anxiety.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Human-socialized dogs and wolves show similar behavioural reactions to human fear odour.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- From female to female: Communication via chemosignals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Unintended VOC emissions from cotton and viscose pads complicate olfactory experiments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Confounding Factors and Their Mitigation in Measurements of Bioelectrical Impedance at the Skin Interface.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Enhanced sensitivity to odors due to chemosignals associated with anxiety.Communications chemistry · 2025Article
- Airway sensory systems: breathing new life into microbiota-brain communication.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2025Review
- Not just avoidance: dogs show subtle individual differences in reacting to human fear chemosignals.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
- Olfactory bulb astrocytes link social transmission of stress to cognitive adaptation in male mice.Nature communications · 2024Article
- How priming with body odors affects decision speeds in consumer behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Emotional expression in human odour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Academic stress detection on university students during COVID-19 outbreak by using an electronic nose and the galvanic skin response.Biomedical signal processing and control · 2021Article
- Olfaction in the Multisensory Processing of Faces: A Narrative Review of the Influence of Human Body Odors.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence that Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women's Sexual Arousal.Archives of sexual behavior · 2020Article
- Encoding fear intensity in human sweat.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Identification of Suitable Biomarkers for Stress and Emotion Detection for Future Personal Affective Wearable Sensors.Biosensors · 2020Review
- Chemical Fingerprints of Emotional Body Odor.Metabolites · 2020Article
- Inter- and Intra-Species Communication of Emotion: Chemosignals as the Neglected Medium.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2019Review
- Qualitative Analysis of Emotions: Fear and Thrill.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans can register another person's fear not only with their eyes and ears, but also with their nose. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to body odors from fearful individuals elicited implicit fear in others. The odor of fearful individuals appears to have a distinctive signature that can be produced relatively rapidly, driven by a physiological mechanism that has remained unexplored in earlier research. The apocrine sweat glands in the armpit that are responsible for chemosignal production contain receptors for adrenalin. We therefore expected that the release of adrenalin through activation of the rapid stress response system (i.e., the sympathetic-adrenal medullary system) is what drives the release of fear sweat, as opposed to activation of the slower stress response system (i.e., hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis). To test this assumption, sweat was sampled while eight participants prepared for a speech. Participants had higher heart rates and produced more armpit sweat in the fast stress condition, compared to baseline and the slow stress condition. Importantly, exposure to sweat from participants in the fast stress condition induced in receivers (N = 31) a simulacrum of the state of the sender, evidenced by the emergence of a fearful facial expression (facial electromyography) and vigilant behavior (i.e., faster classification of emotional facial expressions).
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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.