ArticleMetabolites2020
Chemical Fingerprints of Emotional Body Odor.
Article in Metabolites, 2020. 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.
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.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Titrating the Smell of Fear: Initial Evidence for Dose-Invariant Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Responses.Psychological science · 2021Trial
- Human-socialized dogs and wolves show similar behavioural reactions to human fear odour.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Behaviour of ewes and lambs in response to human emotional odours.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Study of sampling phases for body odor sampling prior to analysis by TD-GC×GC/ToFMS.Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry · 2025Article
- Enhanced sensitivity to odors due to chemosignals associated with anxiety.Communications chemistry · 2025Article
- Past, Present, and Future of Human Chemical Communication Research.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Identification of acrolein as a novel diagnostic odor biomarker for 1,2,3-trichloropropane-induced hepatotoxicity in Sprague Dawley rats.Toxicological research · 2024Article
- A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Unraveling the potential of breath and sweat VOC capture devices for human disease detection: a systematic-like review of canine olfaction and GC-MS analysis.Frontiers in chemistry · 2023Review
- OdorTAM: Technology Acceptance Model for Biometric Authentication System Using Human Body Odor.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- No Evidence for an Effect of the Smell of Hexanal on Trust in Human-Robot Interaction.International journal of social robotics · 2022Article
- Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours.PloS one · 2022Article
- Emotional expression in human odour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Maternal chemosignals enhance infant-adult brain-to-brain synchrony.Science advances · 2021Article
- Sniffing the human body volatile hexadecanal blocks aggression in men but triggers aggression in women.Science advances · 2021Article
- Pilot Study on Exhaled Breath Analysis for a Healthy Adult Population in Hawaii.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Recent trends in the chromatographic analysis of volatile flavor and fragrance compounds: Annual review 2020.Analytical science advances · 2021Review
- The social odor scale: Development and initial validation of a new scale for the assessment of social odor awareness.PloS one · 2021Article
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
Abstract
Chemical communication is common among animals. In humans, the chemical basis of social communication has remained a black box, despite psychological and neural research showing distinctive physiological, behavioral, and neural consequences of body odors emitted during emotional states like fear and happiness. We used a multidisciplinary approach to examine whether molecular cues could be associated with an emotional state in the emitter. Our research revealed that the volatile molecules transmitting different emotions to perceivers also have objectively different chemical properties. Chemical analysis of underarm sweat collected from the same donors in fearful, happy, and emotionally neutral states was conducted using untargeted two-dimensional (GC×GC) coupled with time of flight (ToF) MS-based profiling. Based on the multivariate statistical analyses, we find that the pattern of chemical volatiles (N = 1655 peaks) associated with fearful state is clearly different from that associated with (pleasant) neutral state. Happy sweat is also significantly different from the other states, chemically, but shows a bipolar pattern of overlap with fearful as well as neutral state. Candidate chemical classes associated with emotional and neutral sweat have been identified, specifically, linear aldehydes, ketones, esters, and cyclic molecules (5 rings). This research constitutes a first step toward identifying the chemical fingerprints of emotion.
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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.