Sensory

COVID-19 and the Chemical Senses: Supporting Players Take Center Stage

The main neurological manifestation of COVID-19 is loss of smell or taste. The high incidence of smell loss without significant rhinorrhea or nasal congestion suggests that SARS-CoV-2 targets the chemical senses through mechanisms distinct from those …

Chemosensation and COVID-19

A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we now know that smell and taste loss are the predominant neurological manifestations of COVID-19. They appear in otherwise asymptomatic individuals, they characterize the acute phase of the disease and we are only starting to understand how smell and taste recover and in which time frame.

Human body odor increases familiarity for faces during encoding‐retrieval task

Odors can increase memory performance when presented as context during both encoding and retrieval phases. Since information from different sensory modalities is integrated into a unified conceptual knowledge, we hypothesize that the social …

Disgust Sensitivity and the Development of Political Attitudes among Children and Their Parents

Body Odors (even when Masked) Make you More Emotional: Behavioral and Neural insights

Morality evolved within specific social contexts that are argued to shape moral choices. In turn, moral choices are hypothesized to be affected by body odors as they powerfully convey socially-relevant information. We thus investigated the neural …

Cognitive, Olfactory, and Affective Determinants of Body Weight in Aging Individuals

_Objective_ A complex interplay of factors including cognitive, sensory and affective aspects has been associated in a controversial way with anthropometric measures related to body weight. _Methods_ Here we propose two studies to investigate whether …

Ethnic influences on the perceptual properties of human chemosignals

Individuals of African and Caucasian descent show different chemical signatures in their body odors (BO). Does such biological difference have a perceptual correlate? We tested BO donors and raters of Afro-Portuguese (AP) and Caucasian ( C) descent …

The Scent of the Other Women: Body Odor-Induced Behavioral and Physiological Effects on Face Categorizations

In body odor research, the interaction of female donors and receivers is scarcely investigated. With the aim to investigate effects of female body odor in a competitive context, we tested 51 women divided into two groups (i.e., a competitive and a …

Women Smelling Men's Masked Body Odors Show Enhanced Harm Aversion in Moral Dilemmas

Among the most unnoticeable stimuli providing social information, body odors are powerful social tools that can modulate behavioral and neural processing. It has recently been shown that body odors can affect moral decision-making, by increasing the …

Anxiety Body Odors as Context for Dynamic Faces: Categorization and Psychophysiological Biases

Body odors (BOs) can convey social information. In particular, their effects are maximal when their presence is paired with meaningful social contexts. Static faces have been widely used as social stimuli. However, they miss a key feature of our …