Women show enhanced attractiveness ratings and neural processing of male faces associated with male chemosensory signals

Abstract

There is growing evidence that humans use olfactory chemosensory signals for social communication, but their role in affective associative learning is largely unknown. To examine this, women implicitly learned face-odor associations by pairing different neutral male faces with either a male chemosignal presumably involved in human mating behavior (dissolved {Delta}4,16-androstadien-3-one, "AND"), a pleasant smell (dissolved vanillin) or the neutral solvent alone. After learning, women rated faces previously paired with AND or vanillin as more attractive than faces paired with solvent, even though they were unable to identify the contingency of face-odor pairings above chance level. On a neurophysiological level, both AND- and vanillin-associated faces evoked stronger magnetoencephalographic correlates of enhanced emotional attention than solvent-associated faces at early (<120 ms) and mid-latency (140-270 ms) processing stages. This study stresses the role of AND as a human chemosignal in implicit social communication and demonstrates its effectiveness in modulating emotional learning.