Trial reportPsychological science2021
Titrating the Smell of Fear: Initial Evidence for Dose-Invariant Behavioral, Physiological, and Neural Responses.
Trial report in Psychological science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The influence of olfactory stimuli on social cognition, prejudice and emotions: a systematic review of the literature.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Smell Is Emotion.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Unintended VOC emissions from cotton and viscose pads complicate olfactory experiments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human ovulatory phase-increasing odors cause positive emotions and stress-suppressive effects in males.iScience · 2025Article
- The interactive role of odor associations in friendship preferences.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Past, Present, and Future of Human Chemical Communication Research.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Not just avoidance: dogs show subtle individual differences in reacting to human fear chemosignals.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
- Olfactory bulb astrocytes link social transmission of stress to cognitive adaptation in male mice.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Leveraging multi-echo EPI to enhance BOLD sensitivity in task-based olfactory fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- A Fresh Look on Old Clothes: Laundry Smell Boosts Second-Hand Store Sales.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- The Effect of Odor Valence on Facial Attractiveness Judgment: A Preliminary Experiment.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Anxiety and amygdala connectivity during movie-watching.Neuropsychologia · 2022Article
- Emotional expression in human odour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Olfaction in the Multisensory Processing of Faces: A Narrative Review of the Influence of Human Body Odors.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- More Data, Please: Machine Learning to Advance the Multidisciplinary Science of Human Sociochemistry.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is well accepted that emotional intensity scales with stimulus strength. Here, we used physiological and neuroimaging techniques to ask whether human body odor-which can convey salient social information-also induces dose-dependent effects on behavior, physiology, and neural responses. To test this, we first collected sweat from 36 males classified as low-, medium-, and high-fear responders. Next, in a double-blind within-subjects functional-MRI design, 31 women were exposed to three doses of fear-associated human chemosignals and neutral sweat while viewing face morphs varying between expressions of fear and disgust. Behaviorally, we found that all doses of fear-sweat volatiles biased participants toward perceiving fear in ambiguous morphs, a dose-invariant effect generally repeated across physiological and neural measures. Bayesian dose-response analysis indicated moderate evidence for the null hypothesis (except for the left amygdala), tentatively suggesting that the human olfactory system engages an all-or-none mechanism for tagging fear above a minimal threshold.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.