It's common knowledge that animals are attracted to scent, but have you ever stopped to think if we are too? we choose friends by smell? This is precisely what a research group from Israel investigated and, as a result, it was observed that people with body odors peers are more likely to become friends at first sight. Keep reading and understand this news better.
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Smells and our choices in relationships
Friendship at first sight is not uncommon. In this sense, Israeli researchers are getting closer to understanding exactly how this occurs. According to a study published at the end of June in the journal Science Advances, friends who get along quickly smell similar.
How was the odor investigation carried out?
The first stage of the study used an electronic nose to analyze the clothes of 20 pairs of friends. Previously, the people analyzed were instructed to sleep alone, not to eat anything with a very strong odor and to shower only with unscented soap.
All survey participants wore a T-shirt for at least six hours at night for a week. Initially, the shirts were separated and frozen, and only later were they analyzed by the artificial nose, which identified the similarities.
Afterwards, volunteers were recruited to compare smells. From this, the scientists found that "click buddies" who hit it off instantly statistically had more similar odor signatures than non-friends.
In other words, the study verified that the objective values obtained with the artificial nose corresponded to the evaluations subjective perceptions of friends and, in addition, pairs of friends may smell more similar than pairs of selected strangers randomly.
Those who lose their sense of smell may have socialization problems
The findings of this work are consistent with studies that have already revealed that people who lose their sense of smell have deficiencies social skills, and that those on the autistic spectrum present the interpretation of the chemical signals of smells produced by the human body impaired.
Thus, the authors highlighted that this discovery is important because it provides a deeper understanding of the human behavior, and can also guide new ways based on smell to intervene in the decline of relationships social.