ArticleScience advances2021
Sniffing the human body volatile hexadecanal blocks aggression in men but triggers aggression in women.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 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
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Androstadienone modulates human aggression in a sex-dependent manner.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Trial
- Rodent models of aggression: from mechanisms to clinical translation.Der Nervenarzt · 2026Review
- Scent of a father: Paternal body odors boost interbrain synchrony.Science advances · 2026Article
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- From female to female: Communication via chemosignals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Identifying the human olfactory and chemosignaling neural networks using event related fMRI and graph theory.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of parenting and infant-evoked aggression.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- NEGR1 Modulates Mouse Affective Discrimination by Regulating Adult Olfactory Neurogenesis.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2024Article
- CFA-treated mice induce hyperalgesia in healthy mice via an olfactory mechanism.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2024Article
- Social odor choice buffers drug craving.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Microbial, proteomic, and metabolomic profiling of the estrous cycle in wild house mice.Microbiology spectrum · 2024Article
- Article
- A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Identifiability in Functional Connectivity May Unintentionally Inflate Prediction Results.ArXiv · 2023Article
- Article
- There is chemistry in social chemistry.Science advances · 2022Article
- Sniffing out smell's effects on human behaviour.Nature · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
24 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In terrestrial mammals, body volatiles can effectively trigger or block conspecific aggression. Here, we tested whether hexadecanal (HEX), a human body volatile implicated as a mammalian-wide social chemosignal, affects human aggression. Using validated behavioral paradigms, we observed a marked dissociation: Sniffing HEX blocked aggression in men but triggered aggression in women. Next, using functional brain imaging, we uncovered a pattern of brain activity mirroring behavior: In both men and women, HEX increased activity in the left angular gyrus, an area implicated in perception of social cues. HEX then modulated functional connectivity between the angular gyrus and a brain network implicated in social appraisal (temporal pole) and aggressive execution (amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) in a sex-dependent manner consistent with behavior: increasing connectivity in men but decreasing connectivity in women. These findings implicate sex-specific social chemosignaling at the mechanistic heart of human aggressive behavior.
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.