Sweat for anxiety: new therapy for social phobia
Not a nice idea: smelling the sweat of strangers. But research results now indicate that this could help people with social anxiety in the future as a new form of therapy.
It is certainly a strange-sounding experimental set-up: test subjects who inhale the underarm sweat of strangers to overcome their fears. But it may yet become a helpful therapy for social anxiety in the future. A team of European scientists led by Elisa Vigna from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm recently presented their study at the European Congress of Psychiatry. They suspect that the smell of underarm sweat activates brain pathways that are associated with emotions. This is said to have a calming effect on anxiety patients. However, it is still unclear whether their hypothesis will ultimately be confirmed.
Not always pleasant: odours give us important signals
Babies are born with a keen sense of smell and love to smell their mum and her milk in the early days. Later in life, odours give us important clues about danger, for example: The smell of smoke, for example, which warns us of fire, or unpleasant-smelling plants, which can prevent us from eating poisonous substances. However, odours can also evoke strong memories and reawaken entire emotional worlds that we associated with them a long time ago.
The upper part of our nose contains receptors that can detect odour aromas. They transmit the signals to our brain, more precisely to the limbic system. This is where affective behaviour (emotionally controlled actions) is controlled. It is also part of our memory and stores memories that are linked to emotions.
Fear sweat versus happy sweat - different effects?
The hypothesis of the Swedish researchers: human body odour can convey our emotional state, for example whether someone is happy or anxious. They even suspect that the odour of sweat can trigger a similar reaction in the person smelling it.
To investigate their hypothesis, they asked volunteers to donate underarm sweat that they had sweated out while watching a scary film or a happy film. Subsequently, 48 women with social anxiety agreed to sniff some of these samples. The test subjects took part in conventional mindfulness therapy at the same time. In order to compare the effect of the sweat, some of the women were given clean air to sniff instead of the body odour. The experiment showed that those who were exposed to sweat seemed to cope better with the therapy.
Is the mere presence of another person enough for the therapy to be successful?
The amazing thing about the results was that it made no difference whether the test subjects breathed in anxiety sweat or the sweat produced during happy films.
Lead researcher Elisa Vigna from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm explains it this way: "Sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as in someone who was frightened by a video clip. So it could be that the chemo-signalling in people's sweat influences their reaction to the treatment. It could be that the mere presence of another person has this effect, but we have yet to confirm that."
In a follow-up study, she and her team now want to test the effect of sweat produced while watching an emotionally neutral film.
Caption photo: Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash
Science editor and biologist. I love animals and am fascinated by plants, their abilities and everything you can do with them. That's why my favourite place is always outside - somewhere in nature, preferably in my wild garden.