Certain body odors might provide a reassuring feeling. According to a study by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, people with social anxiety can benefit from mindfulness therapy combined with exposure to the smells of sweat… of others.
“The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo cues with mindfulness therapy appears to produce better results in the treatment of social anxiety than can be achieved by mindfulness therapy alone,” explains the main researcher of this study, Elisa Vigna, quoted by the Guardian. These conclusions were presented at the last European Congress of Psychiatry which was held in Paris.
The impact of sweat
In this study, scientists have collected sweat of many people who watched films that might evoke fear or a feeling of happiness. Then, they subjected patients suffering from social anxiety to different signals extracted from these samples.
According to the results of this study, women exposed to body odor in addition to mindfulness therapy showed an approximately 39% reduction in anxiety scores compared to 17% for the group that only received the therapy. “We were a bit surprised to find that the emotional state of the person who was producing the sweat did not differ in treatment outcomes: sweat produced when someone was happy had the same effect as someone who was been frightened by a film clip”, underlines the scientist.
Before concluding: “There may therefore be something in the human chemo signals in the sweat in general that affects the response to treatment. It may be that the simple fact of being exposed to the presence of someone else has this effect, but we need to confirm it”.
