Are you an empathic person? If so, you probably have a flair for sensing people’s feelings, reading their facial emotions and perhaps recognizing their smell as well rather easily. A recent collaborative study conducted by Wen Zhou and Denise Chen shows the evidence of the behavioral connection between a sensory system and emotional possessing.

They conducted an experiment for their study on forty four female university students. They were asked to smell three t-shirts and choose the one that belonged to their room-mate. The t-shirts were carefully prepared, worn an overnight for an average of 8 hours. The students were further divided into three groups based on their performance.

The results showed that 21 of them failed both times to choose the correct t-shirt; 10 of them chose the correct t-shirt once; while 13 of them picked the correct one each time. The experiment also showed that the students who correctly identified their room mates’ t-shirt each time did so by its smell. Besides, they could also identify facial emotional expressions better than the other.

On the contrary, further analysis proved that ‘empathy’ was not linked in any way to recognize the smell. It was the students’ skill at using smell for “social” purposes that was linked to empathy. The big question is if this is true, will a social person be able to equally recognize others’ smell better than the rest? How about the altruistic people who naturally feel for others?

Via: Blogspot