Human chemosignals, or body odors, have been shown to be an effective modality of social communication. Importantly, individuals exposed to emotional body odors report a partial reproduction of the affective state of the sender. This phenomenon is particularly relevant in conditions in which social interactions are impaired, such as in depression and social anxiety, and especially in individuals with subclinical symptoms. Here I will present a high-density EEG study in which we investigated how body odors collected in a happiness and a fearful condition can modulate the subjective perceptual experience and the neural processing of neutral faces in individuals with depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and healthy controls (for each group N = 22). Time-frequency analysis was performed to simultaneously investigate the affective disposition and cognitive processing of neutral faces presented in the context of emotional body odors. Emotional body odors confirmed their role as powerful emotional cues, especially in healthy individuals, being able to modulate the processing of neutral faces. Moreover, this study demonstrated that the group with depressive symptoms presented an altered affective disposition and cognitive processing of the neutral faces only in the clean air condition, but not when they were presented with the emotional body odors. With respect to the group with social anxiety symptoms, a higher motivational disposition toward the neutral faces presented in the context of the fear odor emerged, confirming a preferential processing for negative and threatening stimuli in social anxiety. With the results of this study, I will provide a psychophysiological framework for the role of both happiness and fear body odors in affective disorders. The potential role of body odors in the treatment of these disorders will also be discussed.

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