When you鈥檙e in love, everything seems different 鈥� and that includes your sense of smell. Women who are deeply in love struggle to recognise the body odour of male friends, but their ability to distinguish their partner鈥檚 smell is unaffected.
Body odours are known to play a role in human sexual attraction. But how does falling in love affect our perception and processing of these smells?
To find out, and Marilyn Jones-Gotman of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, asked a group of 20 young women with boyfriends to fill in a (pdf format) to determine just how much in love they were. Meanwhile, the women鈥檚 partners and male and female friends slept for a seven nights in a cotton T-shirt with pads sewn into the underarms to soak up their sweat.
Advertisement
In a series of trials, each woman was asked to pick out their lover鈥檚 or a friend鈥檚 T-shirt from three garments, two of which had been worn by strangers. The women鈥檚 scores on the Passionate Love Scale made no difference to their ability to recognise a lover鈥檚 shirt, or that worn by a female friend. But those who were more deeply in love were less good at distinguishing a male friend鈥檚 odour from those of strangers.
The deflection theory
This backs a theory of romantic attraction known as 鈥渄eflection鈥�, which argues that being in love with someone entails a reduction in the amount of attention we give to other potential suitors.
But different mechanisms may be at play with the other senses. Previous brain imaging work has suggested lovers do focus more attention on each other, judging from their reactions to pictures of each other as opposed to those of friends of the opposite sex.
Lundstr枚m, now at the in Philadelphia, next plans to investigate what happens in lovers鈥� brains as they perceive the odours of their partners, friends and strangers. 鈥淚鈥檓 not really a love guru,鈥� he admits. 鈥淭he main focus of the project is to look at how the brain processes odours.鈥�
鈥淚t鈥檚 an interesting starting point for more work,鈥� agrees of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who ran a pioneering study of body odour and human attraction back in 1995.
Journal reference: Hormones and Behavior (DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2008.11.009)
