Your Personality Smells

According to the latest scientific smell-study, you can actually smell crazy (neurotically crazy, that is) people. You -- and we mean the universal you, not you in particular, don't be neurotic -- can smell the personalities of all sorts of people, from outgoing to anxious to dominant. The study elicited 30 men and 30 women to wear white cotton T-shirts three nights in a row, abstaining from using soap, deodorant, or perfume, and from drinking, smoking, or eating "oderous foods" during that period. They also took personality tests.

In a kind of hilarious aspect of the experiment, after all that, 100 men and 100 women were enticed to smell the shirts and guess the personality traits of the smelly shirt-wearers.

Now, while the raters' guesses didn't match up with the self-assessments of the smell subjects absolutely perfectly, they did match up pretty well -- about as well as predicting personality traits based on watching a video, in another study -- for extroversion, neuroticism, and dominance. The most accurate estimates of dominance involved smelling someone of the opposite sex, underscoring, as other experiments have, a link between sense of smell and choosing a mate.

The Daily News wins for creepiest stock photo depiction of this phenomenon.

People can smell your neuroticism [MSNBC]

[JDoll / @thisisjendoll]

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