Originally published: . Volume 12, No. 5. Source pages: 10.
Does Your Nose, Know? Tulane's Dr. Murray Links Smell & Mating
Tulane Assistant Professor Dr. Damian Murray, along with colleagues Drs. Marjorie Prokosch and Zachary Airington, authored an article for the Human Behavior & Evolution Society in April, titled "Does the Nose Know? Exploring the links between smell, disgust, and mating strategies."
In their recently published scientific article, "Investigating the relationship between olfactory acuity, disgust, and mating strategies," the researchers sound of that people with greater discrimination acuity were higher in dispositional sexual disgust. But this group was not higher in pathogen or moral disgust.
The authors found that people with greater discrimination acuity were also less inclined towards short-term mating.
Sexual disgust mediated the relationship between discrimination acuity and short-term mating orientation.
The researchers say their findings the importance of olfaction and olfaction- related disgust in close relationships.
In their article for Human Behavior & Evolution Society Dr. Murray and colleagues wrote "Previous research points to two social processes in which our sense of smell is especially important: 1) deciding with whom we should form and maintain close relationships, and 2) helping us to avoid things and people that could make us sick."
To measure smell ability, the researchers tested participants with Sniffin’ Sticks, commonly used in clinical smell research. With the Sniffin’ Sticks test, they measured three facets of smell ability––threshold, discrimination, and identification.
"We found that smell discrimination– people’s ability to tell smells apart from one another—was related to people’s interest in short-term mating, such that people who were better at telling smells apart tended to report less comfort with engaging in short-term, sexual relationships.
"People with greater smell discrimination also tended to report more disgust towards potentially unpleasant sexual scenarios (such as hearing others have sex).
"These relationships remained consistent after accounting for other factors that could meaningfully impact performance such as gender, English proficiency, and recent sickness (and after adjusting our false positive rate to account for performing multiple tests)."
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