Body odour is the key: Sniff around to know someone better

Body odour is the key: Sniff around to know someone better

 Want to know someone better? Just take a whiff of the person’s clothes, as it could help detect his or her personality traits, a new study has suggested. In the Polish study, published in the European Journal of Personality, participants were asked to assess how outgoing, anxious or dominant people were by just taking a whiff of their clothes.
    While the match-up between responses by the judges and the judged were not perfect, they suggest that, when forming a first impression, we take into account a person’s smell, as well as visual and audible cues to their personality traits, the researchers said. We not only express ourselves through our looks, “we also express ourselves with how we smell”, study author Agnieszka Sorokowska of University of Wroclaw was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
    For their study the researchers asked 30 men and 30 women to don white cotton t-shirts for three consecutive nights. They were also asked not to use fragrances, deodorants or soaps, and not smoke or drink or eat odorous foods during the study.
    Shirts from the “odour donors” were collected and rated by 100 men and 100 women. Raters were asked to smell the shirts and evaluate five personality traits of the donors, on a scale of one to 10. Each rater assessed six shirts, and each shirt was assessed by 20 raters.
    The judges’ ratings matched up with the self-assessments of the donors for three personality traits: extroversion, neuroticism and dominance. The matches were far from perfect. But the predictionsof extroversion and neuroticism through smell were almost matched to those found in a different study on them based on a video depicting a person’s behaviour,