Can we smell happiness?
Scientific litsketch on boosting mental health
Research shows that happiness is literally contagious through smell (de Groot et al., 2015). When we smell the body odour of someone who is feeling happy, we unconsciously become infected with happiness and display a smile. Likewise, when we smell the body odour of someone who is feeling fearful, we unconsciously display fear in our facial expression.
In an experiment, people were made to feel either happy, fearful or neutral, and their body odour was extracted from their armpits. Next, other people were asked to sniff on the extracted odours. The people who smelled the body odour displayed the same emotions as the people whose body odour was taken from.
The people who sniffed the happy odour also showed a broader perception when doing a task, whereas the people who sniffed the fear odour showed a narrower perception when doing the same task. This is consistent with prior research that found that happiness broadens your perspective while fear narrows your perspective (Fredrickson, 2001).
Interestingly, when our immune system gets activated when we get infected by a disease, our body releases an unpleasant smell to warn the people around us (Olsson et al., 2014). This is a way our body is designed to limit the spread of diseases by releasing the smell to limit social interactions. Likewise, we can infect the people around us with the happiness that we experience through bodily odour. A person can brighten the whole room as soon as he or she walks in by displaying a smile, positive voice and body language, but also by spreading their happy smell.
By cultivating true happiness in our hearts, we can be a pleasing aroma to the people around us and infect others with our happiness through smell. Become the person who actually spells like happiness! This will create a ripple effect on those around you and this way, you can literally change how the world "smells".
de Groot, J. H., Smeets, M. A., Rowson, M. J., Bulsing, P. J., Blonk, C. G., Wilkinson, J. E., & Semin, G. R. (2015). A sniff of happiness. Psychological Science, 26(6), 684-700.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218–226.
Olsson, M. J., Lundström, J. N., Kimball, B. A., Gordon, A. R., Karshikoff, B., Hosseini, N., ... & Axelsson, J. (2014). The scent of disease: human body odor contains an early chemosensory cue of sickness. Psychological Science, 25(3), 817-823.