They say happiness is contagious, but I never thought it was meant this literally. Glamour reports that a new study out of Utrecht University in the Netherlands has found that smelling the sweat of a happy person could put you in a good mood!
To find this out, researchers had to do the unpleasant work of making study participants smell strangers’ sweat. Fun, right? Scientists showed movies to twelve men that provoked either fear or happiness, and showed neutral movies to a control group. They collected sweat samples, which 36 women had to smell. The research team gauged the expressions each scent brought about in the women, and discovered that they smiled more often when smelling the sweat of the happy participants.
In previous studies, researchers have learned that negative emotions can be shared via scent, so it’s only fair (if not gross) that happiness can spread this way too! Next time you’re at the gym and mildly horrified by the assault on your nose, remember that it just may be doing you some good!
