Posts Tagged ‘smell’

Attention Women: You Can Sniff Out a Man’s Sexual Intentions

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smell.jpgThink he’s just not that into you? Turns out you can figure it out from his smell—more specifically, through the subconscious signals he’s sending out through chemicals in his sweat. The researchers found that a man’s scent is different when he’s sexually aroused than when he’s not—and women can tell the difference.

Psychologist Denise Chen at Rice University asked 20 heterosexual men to refrain from using deodorant and use scent-free shampoo and soap when showering. The men were then asked to watch videos showing “sexual intercourse between heterosexual couples” for 20 minutes. The researchers put pads in the subjects’ armpits to collect their sweat, and hooked the men up to electrodes to measure their sexual excitement. Then the men were asked to collect their sweat while they watched educational documentaries, so the female sniffers could compare.

The researchers then hooked 19 women up to brain scans and asked each of them to smell the pads and describe the sweat as floral, sweaty/human, other, and no smell. The women couldn’t distinguish between sexual sweat and “neutral” sweat, further suggesting that the response to sexual sweat is subconscious. But their brain scans showed something different:

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January 13th, 2009 Tags: , , , ,
by Boonsri Dickinson in Sex & Mating | 6 Comments » | RSS feed | Trackback >

“True Love” May Change a Woman’s Sense of Smell

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kiss.jpgMillions of Americans can’t smell, and there’s no treatment or cure for it. And if you’re on the pill, you may even have trouble sniffing out a good mate! But new research shows that falling in love can also alter a woman’s sense of smell, suggesting that smell serves as an evolutionary mechanism that reinforces monogamy.

Johan Lundstrom, primary investigator at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Monell Chemical Senses Center, found that when women are deeply in love, they lose some of their ability to differentiate the smells of their male friends.

To test this theory, Lundstrom took 20 female volunteers and measured how in love they were by having them fill out a questionnaire called the Passionate Love Scale. The women were asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 1 to 9 for questions such as:

I sense my body responding when [BOYFRIEND] touches me.

Sometimes I feel I can’t control my thoughts; they are obsessively on [BOYFRIEND].

I’d get jealous if I thought [BOYFRIEND] was falling in love with someone else.

Lundstrom then gave a T-shirt to each of the women’s boyfriends, one female friend, and one male friend, in order to collect body odor samples.

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January 7th, 2009 Tags: , ,
by Boonsri Dickinson in Sex & Mating | 5 Comments » | RSS feed | Trackback >