The scent of a handshake.

[Dean Destructo]

Social chemo-signaling is a part of human behavior, but how chemosignals transfer from one individual to another is unknown. In turn, humans greet each other with handshakes, but the functional antecedents of this behavior remain unclear. To ask whether handshakes are used to sample conspecific social chemosignals, we covertly filmed 271 subjects within a structured greeting event either with or without a handshake.

We found that humans often sniff their own hands, and selectively increase this behavior after handshake. After handshakes within gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own right shaking hand by more than 100%. In contrast, after handshakes across gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own left non-shaking hand by more than 100%.

<abstracttext> Tainting participants with unnoticed odors significantly altered the effects, thus verifying their olfactory nature. Thus, handshaking may functionally serve active yet subliminal social chemosignaling, which likely plays a large role in ongoing human behavior.</abstracttext>


[h=4]KEYWORDS:[/h]handshaking; human; neuroscience; pheromones; sniffing; social chemo-signaling

 

[jimbosmith316]

Is that like smelling someones finger? lol Pretty cool read!

 

[Dean Destructo]

Is that like smelling someones finger? lol Pretty cool read!

Smelling their fingers on your fingers.

 

[Mountain_Man]

Nice intelligent Info bro I learned somthing so i am impressed

 

[yellow snow]

Good read...........definintly not something I expected to learn on this website!!

 

[TX TERROR]

Good read...........definintly not something I expected to learn on this website!!

Right haha I'm thinking the same thing. Awesome read though.


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[Presser]

I love this kind of stuff ! Thnx Dean

 

[Presser]

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ODEsfmztMmw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[Presser]

I have one on Womens Tears giving off a scent that lowers mens testosteorne and arousal, i will post it in another new thread, its pretty cool

 

[Presser]

You won’t believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you’ll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour – revealed by covert filming – suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.
We know that women’s tears transmit chemosensory signals – their scent lowers testosterone levels and dampens arousal in men – and that human sweat can transmit fear. But unlike other mammals, humans don’t tend to go around sniffing each other.
Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other – shaking hands. “We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face,” says Sobel.


To find out if people really were smelling their hands, as opposed to scratching their nose, for example, his team surreptitiously filmed 153 volunteers. Some were wired up to a variety of physiological instruments so that airflow to the nose could be measured without them realising this was the intention.
Take a good sniff

The volunteers were filmed as they greeted a member of the team, either with or without a handshake. The researchers recorded how often the volunteers lifted their hands close to their nose, and how long they kept them there, the minute before and after the greeting.
Before the greeting, both men and women had their hand near their nose 22 per cent of the time, on average. Airflow in the nose more than doubled at the same time, suggesting they were smelling their hands.
After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, on average volunteers sniffed their shaking hand more than twice as much as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their non-shaking hand twice as much as before the handshake. This usually happened once the experimenter had left the room.



The team also carried out the experiment with people wearing sterile gloves. The chemicals the gloves picked up from the experimenter’s hand included squalene and hexadecanoic acid, both of which are involved in social signalling among dogs and rats.
“People constantly have a hand at their face, they are sniffing it, and they modify that behaviour after shaking hands. That demonstrates that the handshaking is a chemosignalling behaviour,” says Sobel.
Just like rats

It may seem counter-intuitive that the volunteers smelled their shaking hand more when they encountered someone of the same sex, but that’s the wrong way to think about it, says Sobel. “We tend to think of social chemosignalling as a cross-gender story but it’s not.” There are plenty of instances where signalling happens within the same sex, he says, such as women synchronising their menstrual cycles or rodents sniffing out dominance. The behaviour could also be context-specific, he suggests. In a bar, for example, the pattern might be reversed.
“I am convinced that this is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Sobel. “This is just one more instance where chemosignalling is a driving force in human behaviour.” One surprise was just how much the volunteers were smelling their hands. “When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats. It’s like blindsight – you see it all the time but you just don’t think of it.”
Charles Wysocki at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia agrees. “It fits with the general idea that there is a lot more chemical communication going on that we are unaware of”.
As well as trying to work out exactly what sort of information might be transmitted, Sobel’s team is now looking at how chemosensory signalling through handshaking might be affected in behavioural conditions such as autism spectrum disorders.

 

[jimbosmith316]

Very cool shit!

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[LeatherHead]

Learned another thing today.

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[The Dude]

Interesting. It would be cool to see what impact different smells / chemicals would have on the subject's perception of the tester

 

[Presser]

Interesting. It would be cool to see what impact different smells / chemicals would have on the subject's perception of the tester

what kind of smells? I think that would cool to test too , just curious what kind of smells you mean?

on a side note, When i first started dating my wife she use to always smell my skin and tell me she loves the smell, i would ask her what i smell like and she would say my name, lol, it turned her on she said, ill bet our chemical odor whether conscience of it or not is more powerful than appearance or at least equal.

Anyhow yeah this stuff is super cool science

 

[The Dude]

what kind of smells? I think that would cool to test too , just curious what kind of smells you mean?

on a side note, When i first started dating my wife she use to always smell my skin and tell me she loves the smell, i would ask her what i smell like and she would say my name, lol, it turned her on she said, ill bet our chemical odor whether conscience of it or not is more powerful than appearance or at least equal.

Anyhow yeah this stuff is super cool science

That's exactly What Silk does. I also know that the smell of her skin or hair relaxes me.
I don't know if I'm interested in smells from anything specific. Maybe a chemical markers or neurotransmitters. We secrete all kinds of crazy shit. I'd be super interested in isolating things and seeing what effects that has in a saline solution (similar to sweat, but bare... without any OTHER chemicals, neurotransmitters, or anything else we secrete). I'd be super interested to see what is increased in individuals with supra physiological amounts of testosterone.. etc..
If we could isolate it, that would be of substantial use in Modern warfare as a chemical weapon..
We live in crazy times.

 

[Presser]

I would venture to guess with all the Testosterone i was on when i met my wife that she thought i smelled like a few things subconsciously "safety" "Virile" come to mind, lol