Emotional self-body odours do not influence the access to visual awareness by emotional faces

A growing body of research suggests that the emotional chemosignals in others’ body odour (BO), particularly those sampled during feelings of fear, influence emotional face perception in conscious and preconscious stages. However, the effect of emotional cues in self-BO, i.e., one’s body odour, is still neglected in the literature. In the present work, we sought to determine for the first time if emotional signals in self-BOs modify the access to visual awareness of emotional faces. Thirty-eight women underwent a breaking-Continuous Flash Suppression (bCFS) task in which they were asked to detect fearful, happy, and neutral faces as quickly and accurately as possible while being exposed to their fearful, happy, and neutral self-Bos, recorded in a previous session, and delivered via an olfactometer. Results showed a main effect of emotional face, with happy faces being consciously detected significantly faster than fearful and neutral faces. However, our hypothesis that fear self-BOs would lead to faster facial expression detection was not confirmed, as no effect of emotional self-BOs was found – this was confirmed with Bayesian analyses. Although caution is needed when interpreting these results due to the small sample size, our findings, and the literature, suggest that emotional face perception is modulated by emotional other-, but not self-BOs. Further research is needed to understand the role of self-BOs in emotional face perception.