ArticleScientific reports2019
Body odors (even when masked) make you more emotional: behavioral and neural insights.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 35 citations in OpenAlex.
- The influence of olfactory stimuli on social cognition, prejudice and emotions: a systematic review of the literature.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Titrating the Smell of Fear: Initial Evidence for Dose-Invariant Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Responses.Psychological science · 2021Trial
- Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment in Dilemma Versus Non-Dilemma Contexts.Brain and behavior · 2026Review
- Emotion perception through the nose: how olfactory emotional cues modulate the perception of neutral facial expressions in affective disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Functional connectivity patterns in parosmia.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2023Article
- How priming with body odors affects decision speeds in consumer behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- You See What You Smell: Preferential Processing of Chemosensory Satiety Cues and Its Impact on Body Shape Perception.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- The importance of the olfactory system in human well-being, through nutrition and social behavior.Cell and tissue research · 2021Review
- Does inappropriate behavior hurt or stink? The interplay between neural representations of somatic experiences and moral decisions.Science advances · 2020Article
- Human body odor increases familiarity for faces during encoding-retrieval task.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Behavioral and Neurobiological Convergence of Odor, Mood and Emotion: A Review.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Children's Body Odors: Hints to the Development Status.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Morality evolved within specific social contexts that are argued to shape moral choices. In turn, moral choices are hypothesized to be affected by body odors as they powerfully convey socially-relevant information. We thus investigated the neural underpinnings of the possible body odors effect on the participants' decisions. In an fMRI study we presented to healthy individuals 64 moral dilemmas divided in incongruent (real) and congruent (fake) moral dilemmas, using different types of harm (intentional: instrumental dilemmas, or inadvertent: accidental dilemmas). Participants were required to choose deontological or utilitarian actions under the exposure to a neutral fragrance (masker) or body odors concealed by the same masker (masked body odor). Smelling the masked body odor while processing incongruent (not congruent) dilemmas activates the supramarginal gyrus, consistent with an increase in prosocial attitude. When processing accidental (not instrumental) dilemmas, smelling the masked body odor activates the angular gyrus, an area associated with the processing of people's presence, supporting the hypothesis that body odors enhance the saliency of the social context in moral scenarios. These results suggest that masked body odors can influence moral choices by increasing the emotional experience during the decision process, and further explain how sensory unconscious biases affect human behavior.
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Registered trials
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