Entangled chemosensory emotion and identity: Familiarity enhances detection of chemosensorily encoded emotion

Abstract

Biologically significant, natural human body odors covey emotion and identity—two qualities shown to build on dissociated modules in face and voice perceptions. To what extent such segregation applies to chemosensory processing of body odors has hardly been studied. The current study probes this issue by recruiting heterosexual couples, who are genetically independent yet sexually and emotionally engaged to one another, as both odor donors and odor judges, and comparing their sensitivities to the chemosensory emotional cues from their partner vs. those from opposite-sex strangers. We demonstrate that familiarity subconsciously sharpens one's sensitivity to chemosensory emotional cues, which increases as a function of the time couples have spent together. Nevertheless, the specific chemosensory identity and emotional content remain undelineated and inaccessible to verbal awareness. Our findings reveal a different pattern from those of face and voice perceptions and provide insights into the mechanisms and interplays of chemosensory emotion and identity processings.

Keywords:

• Chemosensory emotion
• Identity
• Familiarity
• Heterosexual couples

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by National Institute of Health Grant R03DC4956. We thank Susan Barrows, Kayshin Chan, Ilana Feld, Javier Garcia, Daniel Glaser, Josh Hesterman, Judy Jia, Ameeta Katdare, Beth Leimbach, Jeff Lin, Nadia Lucas, Stacey Meier, Will Miller, Vickie Nguyen, Andy Quesada, Paula Steinhauser, Claire Vaughan, and Jacob Zachariah for their assistance.