Fear sweat makes people more accurate and cautious

It is well documented that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to important changes in animals of the same species. Now, Rice University researchers studied the effects of sweat on the brain performance of women. The sweat used in the tests came either from scared volunteers (people who sweated while watching horror films) or normal volunteers. The theory was that fear-induced sweat contains chemical signals that affects brain function.

The experiment was straightforward: 75 female students between the ages of 18 and 22 respond to 320 pairs of words that flashed for three seconds each on a computer screen. For each pair, the participants had to press a key to indicate whether the words were associated with each other (for example, arms and legs) or not (arms and wind). Some of the words were associated with threatening or fear-related topics, like weapons. Each participant had a piece of gauze attached above their lips so that they were exposed to either chemicals from sweat or none at all during the tests. The experiment compared how the chemicals from sweat impacted the speed and accuracy of participants’ results on the word-association tests.

When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, and those in either the neutral sweat or the control (no-sweat) condition were 80 percent accurate. When processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition. These differences are statistically significant and point to further research about the mechanism of these effects.

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