Abstract
The androgen derivative androstadienone is a substance found in human sweat and thus is a putative human chemosignal. Androstadienone has been studied with respect to effects on mood states, attractiveness ratings, physiological and neural activation. With the current experiment, we aimed to explore in which way androstadienone affects attention to social cues (human faces). Moreover, we wanted to test whether effects depend on specific emotions, the participants' sex and individual sensitivity to smell androstadienone. To do so, we investigated 56 healthy individuals (thereof 29 females taking oral contraceptives) with two attention tasks on two consecutive days (once under androstadienone, once under placebo exposure in pseudorandomized order). With an emotional dot-probe task we measured visuo-spatial cueing while an emotional Stroop task allowed us to investigate interference control. Our results suggest that androstadienone acts in a sex, task and emotion-specific manner as a reduction in interference processes in the emotional Stroop task was only apparent for angry faces in men under androstadienone exposure. More specifically, men showed a smaller difference in reaction times for congruent compared to incongruent trials. At the same time also women were slightly affected by smelling androstadienone as they classified angry faces more often correctly under androstadienone. For the emotional dot-probe task no modulation by androstadienone was observed. Furthermore, in both attention paradigms individual sensitivity to androstadienone was neither correlated with reaction times nor error rates in men and women. To conclude, exposure to androstadienone seems to potentiate the relevance of angry faces in both men and women in connection with interference control, while processes of visuo-spatial cueing remain unaffected.
Highlights
Human sweat contains chemosignals that have been shown to increase state anxiety in women [1], induce fearful facial expressions in the observer [2] and increase reaction times to anxietyrelated words [3]
Sex of the experimenter can possibly have an influence on AND-effects as Lundstrom and Olsson [10] found an increase of positive mood for female participants only when tested by a male but not female experimenter
We wanted to test whether effects depend on specific emotions, the participants’ sex and individual sensitivity to smell AND
Summary
Human sweat contains chemosignals that have been shown to increase state anxiety in women [1], induce fearful facial expressions in the observer [2] and increase reaction times to anxietyrelated words [3]. Though the exact composition of human sweat varies between individuals, it contains a mixture of different compounds including androgens like androstenone, androstanol and androstadienone (4,16-androstadien-3-one, AND) [4]. Sex of the experimenter can possibly have an influence on AND-effects as Lundstrom and Olsson [10] found an increase of positive mood for female participants only when tested by a male but not female experimenter. In the same study sex of experimenter did not have an influence on a task of sustained attention suggesting a dissociation between the effects of sex of experimenter on mood and cognitive parameters
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