Fear is contagious, say scientists
Updated on 04 December 2008
People who are scared could give off secret signals in their sweat that are subconsciously picked up by others making their fear "contagious", scientists said.
The influence of pheromones, chemicals released by the body, on human behaviour has been hotly debated by scientists for years.
But a new unpublished study, reported in New Scientist magazine, found that volunteers responded to sweat from frightened people.
Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York taped absorbent pads to the armpits of 40 volunteers about to do their first ever sky-dive.
They collected the sweat produced as the volunteers plummeted to Earth and then asked a second group of volunteers to breath the fear-soaked samples alongside some fear-free sweat.
The second group's brain activity was monitored as they smelled the samples and they displayed more activity in the brain's fear centres when they were exposed to the skydivers sweat.
The team, led by Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, told the magazine that their results "indicate that there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress, is quite literally, 'contagious'".
But other specialists say that the absence of any evidence that volunteers actually felt scared means that it is too early to say conclusively that pheromones influence our behaviour.
Others are concerned that studies like the New York project, which was funded by the US military's research arm, could be used to develop "fear pheromones" for military use.
Simon Wesseley, psychiatrist at King's College London, told the magazine that studies in the 1960s had shown that injecting people with adrenaline did not make them fearful until the situation became threatening. He said: "You can generate the physical symptoms of fear but people don't necessarily get scared."
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