Human body odors are an effective modality of social communication. Individuals exposed to emotional body odors report a partial reproduction of the affective state of the sender. The present study aimed to explore how body odors collected in happiness and fearful conditions modulate the subjective ratings, the psychophysiological response and the neural processing of neutral faces in individuals with depressive symptoms, with social anxiety symptoms, and healthy controls (N = 22 for each group). To this aim, electrocardiogram (ECG) and EEG (using a 256-channel system) were recorded continuously. As for subjective ratings, we found a significant group main effect of the arousal ratings: individuals with depressive and social anxiety symptoms rated the neutral faces as more arousing than control individuals. Moreover, we found that individuals with depressive symptoms, compared to social anxiety and healthy individuals, rated the neutral faces as more arousing when they were presented in concomitant with the fear odor (p = 0.002), but not with happiness or clean air. This result was replicated when continuous measure of depressive symptoms was analysed in respect of odor condition, confirming that individuals with depressive symptoms seem to be especially sensitive to fear body odor as contextual information. From the ECG we extracted the heart rate variability (HRV). Results showed a main effect of odor: HRV increased during the fear and happiness body odors compared to clean air, suggesting that at peripheral level the two emotional body odors seem to show similar affective reactions. Finally, regarding EEG data, analyses are ongoing. Results of both ERPs and time-frequency analyses will be presented. These preliminary results confirm the role of body odors in modulating both the subjective and physiological responses.

FUNDING: European Commission Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant numbers 824153] to the POTION project