This is a lovely piece of work, from Clara Wilson based at Queens University, Belfast. This is directly from her Twitter feed:
“Stress has an odour and dogs can smell it - new paper out! In each test session, dogs were given one person’s relaxed and stressed samples, taken only four minutes apart. In 94% of 720 trials, the dogs were able to correctly alert us to the stress sample.
Dogs possess an incredible sense of smell, which enables them to detect diseases and health conditions from odour alone. Whether these capabilities extend to detecting odours associated with psychological states has been explored far less. We attached sensors to human study participants to continuously measure their heart rate and blood pressure. Participants also rated how stressed they were feeling before and after a stress inducing maths task. Participants provided us with breath/sweat samples before, and immediately after a face paced mental arithmetic task. The total time between the samples was four minutes. Dogs included in the study were pet dogs from the local community. They were all superstars, and four enjoyed scent games enough to reach testing stage - where we asked them to communicate if they could smell the difference between each person’s baseline and stress sample. As a within-subject design, each person acted as their own control. From the very first time the dogs were exposed to the baseline and stress samples, they communicated that these samples smelled different. In 94% of 720 trials they correctly chose the stress sample.
This finding does not tell us whether dogs perceived the stress samples as reflecting a negative emotional state. It is likely that in real life settings dogs use a variety of cues to understand a situation. This study does provide evidence that a stress odour is detectable. Establishing that dogs can detect an odour associated with human stress provides deeper knowledge of the human-dog relationship. Confirming an odour component to psychological stress may also raise further discussion into scent based training for PTSD or psychiatric service dogs.”
Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours
“Stress has an odour and dogs can smell it - new paper out! In each test session, dogs were given one person’s relaxed and stressed samples, taken only four minutes apart. In 94% of 720 trials, the dogs were able to correctly alert us to the stress sample.
Dogs possess an incredible sense of smell, which enables them to detect diseases and health conditions from odour alone. Whether these capabilities extend to detecting odours associated with psychological states has been explored far less. We attached sensors to human study participants to continuously measure their heart rate and blood pressure. Participants also rated how stressed they were feeling before and after a stress inducing maths task. Participants provided us with breath/sweat samples before, and immediately after a face paced mental arithmetic task. The total time between the samples was four minutes. Dogs included in the study were pet dogs from the local community. They were all superstars, and four enjoyed scent games enough to reach testing stage - where we asked them to communicate if they could smell the difference between each person’s baseline and stress sample. As a within-subject design, each person acted as their own control. From the very first time the dogs were exposed to the baseline and stress samples, they communicated that these samples smelled different. In 94% of 720 trials they correctly chose the stress sample.
This finding does not tell us whether dogs perceived the stress samples as reflecting a negative emotional state. It is likely that in real life settings dogs use a variety of cues to understand a situation. This study does provide evidence that a stress odour is detectable. Establishing that dogs can detect an odour associated with human stress provides deeper knowledge of the human-dog relationship. Confirming an odour component to psychological stress may also raise further discussion into scent based training for PTSD or psychiatric service dogs.”
Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours
