Is your partner's scent enough for you to detect their emotions?

People who are close and in relationships are able to detect subtle differences in their significant other's emotional state. They detect fear, happiness, and sexual arousal through scent. Partners do this unconsciously, according to a study presented at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science. You know your partner well – their scent is enough to read their emotions Couples who know each other best and who have lived together the longest are more effective at understanding each other's emotional state. A perfect understanding of their partner and their habits allows for more effective detection of emotional cues from their scent , claims Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston. An experiment she conducted on 20 heterosexual couples confirmed this theory. A sweat sample will tell you about your emotions Chen studied 20 couples who had been living together for between one and seven years. They included married and unmarried couples. The psychologist collected sweat samples from the volunteers using absorbent pads. While wearing the pads, the volunteers watched videos that evoked sexual arousal, happiness, fear, or neutral images. In the next stage of the experiment, couples smelled the odors from four jars containing the sweat of their partner and a stranger of the opposite sex. Volunteers attempted to identify the jar that smelled of the indicated emotion. They chose between a jar containing a sample collected during an emotional video and one containing a sample from a neutral video. The longer you live together, the more accurately you will identify happiness by smell. Overall, the volunteers were able to detect specific emotions from their partner's body odor two-thirds of the time. Couples who had lived together the longest were most accurate. This accuracy dropped to 50% for strangers of the opposite sex. The researchers found no significant differences between identifying sexual arousal, happiness, or fear. Although the volunteers often matched the scent of specific emotions, they were unable to confirm whether the samples came from their partners.