Researchers reportedly found that when people experience happiness, they produce chemical compounds or chemosignals in their sweat, which can be detected by others.
“This suggests that somebody who is happy will infuse others in their vicinity with happiness. In a way, happiness sweat is somewhat like smiling - it is infectious,” stated senior study author Gün Semin, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
For the recent study, Semin and his colleagues asked 12 men to take part in an experiment that involved watching a video clip that would produce fear, happiness or a neutral emotion, according to Medical News Today. They were reportedly asked to rinse and dry their armpits and attach absorbent pads to them before watching the clips.
The men were also reportedly asked to view a number of Chinese symbols and rate how pleasant or unpleasant they felt each one made them feel so the team could measure their “implicit emotion.”
Researchers then reportedly recruited 36 women to the study. The women were reportedly asked to smell a sweat sample of each type of emotion the men experienced throughout their study, while researchers measured their facial expressions to see what emotions they felt with each sample.
The women who smelled the “happy sweat” reportedly showed facial expressions linked to happiness.
“We observed that exposure to body odor collected from senders of chemosignals in a happy state induced a facial expression and perceptual-processing style indicative of happiness in the receivers of those signals,” the research team stated in the study.
“Our findings suggest that not only negative affect but also a positive state can be transferred by means of odors.”
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