Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Smell of success?
The smell of fear can improve our alertness and intelligence, report psychologists in Rice University, Houston. And by being close to people in stressful situations heightens our own abilities.
"It is well-documented in research literature that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to behavioral, endocrinological and immunological changes in their fellow animals of the same species, but we wanted to see if this applies to humans as well," said principal investigator Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice.
Women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all. The study was published this month in the journal Chemical Senses. Each participant had gauze attached to their upper lip, some of which were impregnated by the sweat collected from the armpits of people who had watched horror movies, others were neutral, while some had no sweat at all. When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, six percent more accurate than those who were exposed to non-fear sweat; a statistically significant difference.
If we respond to such subtle and subconscious stimuli it's easy to see how large groups such as football or rugby supporters can affect on another. And in the office, if these chemicals tell us that a member of our own group has detected a problem or an approaching deadline, our brains go into a state of heightened awareness to deal with the challenges.
But equally so, it's my belief that we all give off smells and signals all of the time and these may relate to other emotions too, from happiness, excitement to love and kindness. Smell is only one of the means of transiting messages. The more healthy and in-tune we are with our bodies the more we are likely to pick up on people's energy, good and bad. The more centred and balanced we are, the better we will cope without taking on negative energies...
