4 ms·

You should at least do cursory research before dismissing an idea entirely. Start with these and look at refs: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.

by ASpring 10y ago

You should at least do cursory research before dismissing an idea entirely. Start with these and look at refs: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005987 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guen_Semin/publication/231225277_Chemosignals_Communicate_Human_Emotions/links/02e7e518215711d679000000.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Guen_Semin/publication/...

Geekette 10y ago
The onus is on the publisher to include key data like sample size and cite sources on an article presenting such claims. EDIT On skimming the links you gave, I find that the samples and the researchers' conclusion in each study do not constitute representative samples and empirical evidence for this “emotional contagion” theory, respectively. Both studies also focused on only 1-2 types of emotion (fear, anxiety), which cannot be extrapolated to all emotions. APS published study: Sweat from 10 males + reactions from 36 females. PLOS published study: Sweat from 49 people (28 males 21 females between 20–37, European origin) + reactions from 28 people (14 males and 14 females between 19–30 years).
- ASpring 10y ago
  I agree, the onus is definitely on the publisher to make sure the claims they make are statistically sound. However you're going to lose most of your casual audience if you focus on the statistics. You need to go to the source for that. See reply to pak wrt to sample size. "Support" does not mean "prove". How can you say it doesn't support the idea of emotional contagion when the studies indicate an effect for at least two emotions. Is there more work to be done? Definitely. But these are first steps.
pak 10y ago
Geekette's concerns are really only validated by the references you give. They have a sample size of 28 and 36 smell recipients, respectively (all likely bored undergrads), which seems hardly representative of all cultures and human behavioral contexts. It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. And to more rigorously interpret what was measured by these experiments, both studies examined fear, which has a well-understood hormonal response (adrenaline, etc.) that is already understood to affect sweat content [1], and one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor—enough that this would seem to be a unremarkable emotion to claim was "communicated". Concluding that humans may communicate other more complex emotions (love, hate, sarcasm, uncertainty, trust, whatever) through sweat is what neurobehavioral scientists love to imply via these preliminary studies and have puffed up by the downstream media, but they are just that: only preliminary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating
- ASpring 10y ago
  You bring up sample size here which doesn't really matter because the effect is statistically significant. Your point about the populations being unrepresentative is of course a good point(which can be made about nearly any study, low hanging fruit for criticism) but represents a grave misunderstanding of how science actually happens in the real world. It's absurd to think that you should recruit a representative sample of the entire world to do a preliminary study. Validate on a more convenient sample and expand otherwise it's wasted money and effort. >It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. There is no support for this besides your opinions and naive priors. >one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat without producing an effect.
  - pak 10y ago
    The problem is you're arguing against a totally different position than where Geekette and myself are coming from. Let's go back to the first lines of the OP: "What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication? Compromise? How about a sense of smell?" ... followed by the statement by Dalton that "Smell is important in social bonding." That last statement there is an extremely broad, confident statement (consider how complicated social bonding is), and it's explained by Dalton with this "emotional contagion" idea. Two studies that show statistically significant effects for a total of ~60 people smelling odors from two different conditions (fear and disgust) is not nearly enough evidence to back up an assertion as broad as "smell is important in social bonding," nor that a substantial range of emotions spread via odors (contagion). At best, these two studies are suggestive, at worst they are so flawed as to not lend any evidentiary value. "Statistical significance" is not a substitute for critical thought on how much evidence stands for and against the hypothesis (meta-analysis). If I set up two experiments that showed that gravity doesn't exist, p=0.04 for both, would you set aside the totality of the evidence saying it does? Perhaps you would criticize my methods, or the link from my results to my conclusions, no? You set up a strawman by saying that I'm asking the impossible—that large-scale behavioral cohorts must be assembled for preliminary studies. I'm not. I'm simply expecting some honesty in how people report the conclusions of preliminary studies. >Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat You are incorrect, probably because you did not read past the abstract. Perhaps you should be more careful about telling people how science works in the real world or whatever, because real scientific discussion involves reading methods sections. In the APS paper contrasting fear vs. disgust vs. control, the control condition contained unused compresses, i.e., no sweat at all. From the horse's mouth: "unused absorbent compresses [...] in our view constitute optimal control stimuli because other nonemotional bodily secretions (e.g., sweat from playing sports) can potentially contain other chemosignals." So... I am supposed to believe that when recipients smelled sweat from the donors watching disgusting videos, compared to no sweat, feeling disgusted at the sweaty odor is some kind of "emotional connection" to how disgusted the donor felt while sweating? Give me a break—this is a sham negative control. The huge confounder, as Geekette rightly points out, is that many people are normally disgusted by any sweaty odor.

by ASpring 10y ago

Geekette 10y ago

The onus is on the publisher to include key data like sample size and cite sources on an article presenting such claims. EDIT On skimming the links you gave, I find that the samples and the researchers' conclusion in each study do not constitute representative samples and empirical evidence for this “emotional contagion” theory, respectively. Both studies also focused on only 1-2 types of emotion (fear, anxiety), which cannot be extrapolated to all emotions. APS published study: Sweat from 10 males + reactions from 36 females. PLOS published study: Sweat from 49 people (28 males 21 females between 20–37, European origin) + reactions from 28 people (14 males and 14 females between 19–30 years).

ASpring 10y ago
I agree, the onus is definitely on the publisher to make sure the claims they make are statistically sound. However you're going to lose most of your casual audience if you focus on the statistics. You need to go to the source for that. See reply to pak wrt to sample size. "Support" does not mean "prove". How can you say it doesn't support the idea of emotional contagion when the studies indicate an effect for at least two emotions. Is there more work to be done? Definitely. But these are first steps.

pak 10y ago

Geekette's concerns are really only validated by the references you give. They have a sample size of 28 and 36 smell recipients, respectively (all likely bored undergrads), which seems hardly representative of all cultures and human behavioral contexts. It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. And to more rigorously interpret what was measured by these experiments, both studies examined fear, which has a well-understood hormonal response (adrenaline, etc.) that is already understood to affect sweat content [1], and one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor—enough that this would seem to be a unremarkable emotion to claim was "communicated". Concluding that humans may communicate other more complex emotions (love, hate, sarcasm, uncertainty, trust, whatever) through sweat is what neurobehavioral scientists love to imply via these preliminary studies and have puffed up by the downstream media, but they are just that: only preliminary. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocrine_sweat_gland#Sweating

ASpring 10y ago
You bring up sample size here which doesn't really matter because the effect is statistically significant. Your point about the populations being unrepresentative is of course a good point(which can be made about nearly any study, low hanging fruit for criticism) but represents a grave misunderstanding of how science actually happens in the real world. It's absurd to think that you should recruit a representative sample of the entire world to do a preliminary study. Validate on a more convenient sample and expand otherwise it's wasted money and effort. >It's probably a fair hypothesis that they would not hold up to larger validation studies with more participants and more emotions tested. There is no support for this besides your opinions and naive priors. >one study examined disgust, which as Geekette states is a reasonable default reaction to sweaty odor Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat without producing an effect.
- pak 10y ago
  The problem is you're arguing against a totally different position than where Geekette and myself are coming from. Let's go back to the first lines of the OP: "What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication? Compromise? How about a sense of smell?" ... followed by the statement by Dalton that "Smell is important in social bonding." That last statement there is an extremely broad, confident statement (consider how complicated social bonding is), and it's explained by Dalton with this "emotional contagion" idea. Two studies that show statistically significant effects for a total of ~60 people smelling odors from two different conditions (fear and disgust) is not nearly enough evidence to back up an assertion as broad as "smell is important in social bonding," nor that a substantial range of emotions spread via odors (contagion). At best, these two studies are suggestive, at worst they are so flawed as to not lend any evidentiary value. "Statistical significance" is not a substitute for critical thought on how much evidence stands for and against the hypothesis (meta-analysis). If I set up two experiments that showed that gravity doesn't exist, p=0.04 for both, would you set aside the totality of the evidence saying it does? Perhaps you would criticize my methods, or the link from my results to my conclusions, no? You set up a strawman by saying that I'm asking the impossible—that large-scale behavioral cohorts must be assembled for preliminary studies. I'm not. I'm simply expecting some honesty in how people report the conclusions of preliminary studies. >Did you even read either abstract? This is controlled for. There is a control group inhaling normal sweat You are incorrect, probably because you did not read past the abstract. Perhaps you should be more careful about telling people how science works in the real world or whatever, because real scientific discussion involves reading methods sections. In the APS paper contrasting fear vs. disgust vs. control, the control condition contained unused compresses, i.e., no sweat at all. From the horse's mouth: "unused absorbent compresses [...] in our view constitute optimal control stimuli because other nonemotional bodily secretions (e.g., sweat from playing sports) can potentially contain other chemosignals." So... I am supposed to believe that when recipients smelled sweat from the donors watching disgusting videos, compared to no sweat, feeling disgusted at the sweaty odor is some kind of "emotional connection" to how disgusted the donor felt while sweating? Give me a break—this is a sham negative control. The huge confounder, as Geekette rightly points out, is that many people are normally disgusted by any sweaty odor.