ArticleeLife2015
A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking.
Article in eLife, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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.
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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.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Scent of a father: Paternal body odors boost interbrain synchrony.Science advances · 2026Article
- Why dogs prefer zoomies to zoom and what it tells us about the importance of in-person meetings for learning and memory.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- Altered olfactory responses in Fmr1 KO mice.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Past, Present, and Future of Human Chemical Communication Research.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway.Science advances · 2024Review
- Effects of psychological stress on the emission of volatile organic compounds from the skin.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- There is chemistry in social chemistry.Science advances · 2022Article
- Evidence for a vocal signature in the rat and its reinforcing effects: a key role for the subthalamic nucleus.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Human Primary Olfactory Amygdala Subregions Form Distinct Functional Networks, Suggesting Distinct Olfactory Functions.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- The importance of the olfactory system in human well-being, through nutrition and social behavior.Cell and tissue research · 2021Review
- Genetic influences of autism candidate genes on circuit wiring and olfactory decoding.Cell and tissue research · 2021Review
- The role of the microbiome in the neurobiology of social behaviour.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2020Article
- Interdisciplinary challenges for elucidating human olfactory attractiveness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Reproducible research into human chemical communication by cues and pheromones: learning from psychology's renaissance.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Design, delivery and perception of condition-dependent chemical signals in strepsirrhine primates: implications for human olfactory communication.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Human olfactory communication: current challenges and future prospects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Are humans constantly but subconsciously smelling themselves?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Article
- Chemical features mining provides new descriptive structure-odor relationships.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Human chemosignals of disgust facilitate food judgment.Scientific reports · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social chemosignaling is a part of human behavior, but how chemosignals transfer from one individual to another is unknown. In turn, humans greet each other with handshakes, but the functional antecedents of this behavior remain unclear. To ask whether handshakes are used to sample conspecific social chemosignals, we covertly filmed 271 subjects within a structured greeting event either with or without a handshake. We found that humans often sniff their own hands, and selectively increase this behavior after handshake. After handshakes within gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own right shaking hand by more than 100%. In contrast, after handshakes across gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own left non-shaking hand by more than 100%. Tainting participants with unnoticed odors significantly altered the effects, thus verifying their olfactory nature. Thus, handshaking may functionally serve active yet subliminal social chemosignaling, which likely plays a large role in ongoing human behavior.
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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.