| Title: | A social chemosignaling function for human handshaking |
| Author(s): | Frumin I; Perl O; Endevelt-Shapira Y; Eisen A; Eshel N; Heller I; Shemesh M; Ravia A; Sela L; Arzi A; Sobel N; |
| Address: | "Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel" |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 2050-084X (Electronic) 2050-084X (Print) 2050-084X (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "Social chemosignaling is a part of human behavior, but how chemosignals transfer from one individual to another is unknown. In turn, humans greet each other with handshakes, but the functional antecedents of this behavior remain unclear. To ask whether handshakes are used to sample conspecific social chemosignals, we covertly filmed 271 subjects within a structured greeting event either with or without a handshake. We found that humans often sniff their own hands, and selectively increase this behavior after handshake. After handshakes within gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own right shaking hand by more than 100%. In contrast, after handshakes across gender, subjects increased sniffing of their own left non-shaking hand by more than 100%. Tainting participants with unnoticed odors significantly altered the effects, thus verifying their olfactory nature. Thus, handshaking may functionally serve active yet subliminal social chemosignaling, which likely plays a large role in ongoing human behavior" |
| Keywords: | Adult Female *Hand Humans Male Odorants *Signal Transduction Smell *Social Behavior handshaking human neuroscience pheromones sniffing social chemosignaling; |
| Notes: | "MedlineFrumin, Idan Perl, Ofer Endevelt-Shapira, Yaara Eisen, Ami Eshel, Neetai Heller, Iris Shemesh, Maya Ravia, Aharon Sela, Lee Arzi, Anat Sobel, Noam eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S. England 2015/03/04 Elife. 2015 Mar 3; 4:e05154. doi: 10.7554/eLife.05154" |
