The Olfactory System and Its Play in Sexual Mating

Sexual attraction, it is part of our everyday lives. We see people all around us who are attractive to us, the girl who makes your coffee everyday, or the guy who runs a training program at the gym. There are so many different qualities that make up sexual attraction between humans. The personality of a person, how they look, how they act, and surprisingly how they smell all are part of the human way of judging who we want to couple up with. Our bodies let other knows if we are a good match or not without us saying a word or even realize what is going on. In recent years there has been an increase in research of the olfaction and its role in sexual attraction. The whole role of smells and pheromones are increasingly becoming part of the human sexual attraction. The possibility of our scent as a signal to the opposite sex that we are a good match down to the very chemicals is quite surprising. Researchers are finding more and more evidence on how a person smells effect their attraction to someone of the opposite sex. This is a look at the background of the research, the research itself, and what the results are.

The smell of a person doesn’t always push the opposite sex away; in fact the smell may just bring them right to you. In a study done back in 2008 a group of researchers wanted to see how much smell has an effect on women and their judge of men’s good looks. In a study of forty four women rating the sweat smell of a t-shirt along with a photo of the male, the women were told to rate attractiveness by smell of the t-shirt and/or by the photo of the male. They tested each stimulus separate at one point, and then during the latter half of the study they combined the two by putting a photo of the man matching his t shirt and ...

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...esting things but is reparative of research done before and after it. It did bring up the point of women’s menstrual cycles and how that has a role to play in the pheromone world.

Works Cited

1) Foster, J. D. (2008). Beauty Is Mostly in the Eye of the Beholder: Olfactory Versus Visual Cues of Attractiveness. Journal of Social Psychology, 148(6), 765-774. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

2) Roberts, S. A., Simpson, D. M., Armstrong, S. D., Davidson, A. J., Robertson, D. H., McLean, L., & ... Hurst, J. L. (2010). Darcin: a male pheromone that stimulates femalememory and sexual attraction to an individualmale's odour. BMC Biology, 875-95. doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-75

3) Grammer, K., Fink, B., & Neave, N. (2005). Human pheromones and sexual attraction. European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology & Reproductive Biology, 118(2), 135-142. doi:10.1016/j.ejogrb.2004.08.010