People with social anxiety may benefit from exposure therapy to the odors of others' sweat, according to a study. This practice can be used in mental health treatment where people are overly concerned about participating in social situations.
Lead researcher Elisa Vigna, who works at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, explained that an individual's mood triggered the production of molecules (or chemo-signals) in sweat that communicated an emotional state and produced corresponding responses in other people.
"The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo-signals with mindfulness therapy seems to produce better results in the treatment of social anxiety," she said.
Mindfulness therapy is a type of therapy that focuses on learning how to be more aware of thoughts, feelings, emotions and situations to reduce automatic reactions.
The study – which is being presented this week at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris – involved collecting sweat from volunteers and then exposing patients being treated for social anxiety to chemosignals extracted from those samples.
The study found that women who were exposed to the scents responded better to the therapy.
"So there may be something about human chemosignals in sweat in general that affects response to treatment. It could be that simply being exposed to someone else's presence has this effect, but we need to confirm that,” Vigna said.
