Don’t sweat it:  The biocultural relationship between stress and female olfactory ability

Objective: Stress is a mental and physical phenomenon, affecting functions throughout the body. When someone is stressed, they might twitch, stumble over their words, look tense, or sweat. However, these are all visual and auditory clues. We wanted to investigate if people can pick up on the olfactory signals of stress as well. More specifically, we investigated whether sweat produced by individuals who report higher stress is perceived differently than those who report lower levels of stress. Methods: To study the link between stress and smell, we started with two groups of participants. One set of participants ( n  = 19) wore t-shirts overnight and completed several surveys about their mental and emotional states. Another set of participants ( n  = 18) smelled the t-shirts and rated the odors in terms of disgust, intensity, and pleasantness. Results: We found that individuals reporting higher perceived stress, negative affect, and poorer sleep quality had higher ratings of disgust by the t-shirt smellers ( p  < .05). Likewise, if the t-shirt wearers had higher positive affect scores, then their shirts tended to be rated higher on pleasantness. Conclusions: These results suggest a biocultural relationship between stress and smell where olfactory cues of stress are detectable by others and are perceived negatively.