Abstract
Mothers can recognize their own children by body odor. Besides signaling familiarity, children’s body odors may provide other information relevant to maternal caregiving behavior, such as the child’s developmental status. Thus, we explored whether mothers are able to classify body odors on pre- vs. postpubertal status above chance levels. In total, 164 mothers were presented with body odor samples of their own and four unfamiliar, sex-matched children who varied in age (range 0–18 years). Pubertal status was measured by (a) determining the child’s steroid hormone level and (b) parental assessment of the child’s developmental stage using the Pubertal Development Scale. Mothers classified developmental status with an accuracy of about 64%. Maternal assessments were biased toward pre-puberty. Classification was predicted by perceptual evaluation of the body odor (i.e. intensity and pleasantness) and by the child’s developmental stage, but not by hormones. In specific, mothers with pubertal-aged children classified body odors using the child’s developmental status, whereas mothers with younger children only classified body odors using perceptual information (i.e. intensity and pleasantness). Our data suggests that body odors convey developmental cues, but how this developmental information is manifested in body odor remains unclear.
Highlights
Body odors are a potent chemosignal in human social communication for two reasons
As predictors we modeled perceptual evaluation of the body odor in order to assess the influence of affective perception on the classification
When presented to body odors of prepubertal children, mothers stated in 71.6% of the cases that those odors were from a prepubertal donor and in 28.17% that these odors were from a postpubertal donor
Summary
Body odors are a potent chemosignal in human social communication for two reasons They allow recognition of the own relative among a number of individuals (Pause et al, 1998; Lundström et al, 2009). Both hedonic [i.e. pleasantness or attractiveness, (Kuukasjärvi et al, 2004; Croy et al, 2017)] ratings and neural activity (Cecchetto et al, 2019) support the idea that body odors communicate affective information to recipients. The authors concluded that the infantile odor may evoke a desire to bond in parents
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