by Kathleen Sai-Halasz This article was written by a student at the Wheeler School. Brown's chapter of The Triple Helix collaborates with the Wheeler School to engage high school students in science journalism. It is a common misconception that all forms of communication between humans are through verbal or body language. That is, all communication of emotional states of people is through the sense of hearing or visual channels. However, through recent experiments conducted by researchers at Utrecht University, this theory was challenged as researchers showed that people could communicate though chemosignals as well (1). Chemosignals are chemical signals the human body gives off, often through sweat, through which people can interact. Jasper H. B. de Groot and colleagues chose to focus their experiment on the emotions of fear and disgust, and found that chemosignals given off of one person while experiencing one of these emotions can induce the same emotional state upon the inhaler (1). This supports the idea that forms of communication are not limited to eyes and ears, and that through the effects of chemosignals, people can communicate their emotions without needing to hear or see the other person. Researchers at Utrecht University tested the hypothesis that it is possible to transfer an emotion from one person to another through the fumes the sender’s sweat gives off (1). Researchers chose to work with the emotions of fear, scientifically known as sensory acquisition, and disgust, also known as sensory rejection (1). In this experiment, only males were chosen as the senders because they produce more potent sweat signals, whereas only women were chosen to be used as receivers because they are shown to have a more acute sense of smell (1).
0 Comments
|