Big Nose = Big Heart?

Inspired by the works of such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus, Rice University sociochemist Denise Chen decided to investigate the link between scent and emotion for herself. “The olfactory brain overlaps with the emotional brain, and is believed to have contributed to its evolution,” says Chen. “They share close functional and anatomical connections.”

Because women have a more uniform sense of smell than men - and are also thought to be more sensitive to emotional cues - Dr. Chen and graduate student Wen Zhou presented 22 pairs of young women living in Texas university dormitories with identical t-shirts to sleep in for one night.

The t-shirts were later presented to the same women to smell. Each woman was given three t-shirts and informed that one of the shirts had been worn by her roommate, and that the other two had been worn by other university students. The subjects were asked to identify the shirt that had been worn by their roommate, and were subjected to a series of recognized emotional-sensitivity tests.

Subjects who correctly selected the t-shirt worn by their roommates tended to score high on the emotional tests, according to Dr. Chen, indicating that a heightened sense of smell correlates with a heightened emotional capacity.