Scent of Fear May Improve Performance

Can fear that is felt by others sharpen your mind? Research conducted at Rice University suggests that it can. Scientists at that school found that women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all. Here’s how they did it:
Rice University researchers collected samples of sweat from volunteers who kept
gauze pads in their armpits while they watched videos of horror movies
and nonthreatening documentaries. They then had 75 female students respond to 320 pairs of words that flashed for three seconds each on a
computer screen. For each pair, the participants had to press a key to indicate whether the words were associated with each other (for example, arms and legs) or not (arms and wind).  Each participant had a piece of gauze attached above their lips so that they were exposed to either chemicals from sweat or none at all during the tests. Reseachers found that when processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, and those in either the neutral sweat or the control (no-sweat) condition were 80 percent accurate. When processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition. The research participants were not aware of the nature of the smells, and the smells did not differ on the intensity or pleasantness ratings. Read more about how someone else’s fear can sharpen your mind.