Do People Transmit Happiness by Smell?

Lab experiment with 'scent samples' suggests humans pick up on others' positive emotions via sweat

By Alan Mozes

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, May 26, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- As emotions go, happiness usually hides in plain sight: seen in a broad smile, heard in a raucous laugh, felt in a big hug.

But new research suggests there may be a less obvious way to pick up on another person's positive vibes: smell.

According to a team of European researchers, happiness may generate chemicals that get secreted in sweat, and that sweat signal gets sniffed by those around us.

The experiments also suggest that we not only breathe in the upbeat emotions of others, but by doing so we actually become happier ourselves.

"Human sweat produced when a person is happy induces a state similar to happiness in somebody who inhales this odor," said study co-author Gun Semin, a research professor in the department of psychology at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada in Lisbon, Portugal.

The findings were published recently in Psychological Science.

The researchers noted that prior research has already demonstrated that negative emotions, such as fear or disgust, can be communicated via odors in sweat.

To see whether the same holds true for the happier feelings, Semin's team gathered sweat samples from 12 young men after each watched videos designed to induce a variety of emotions, including happiness and fear. All the men were healthy, drug-free nonsmokers, and none drank, consumed smelly foods or engaged in sexual activity during the study period.

In turn, 36 equally healthy young women were engaged to smell the samples while their reactions were monitored. The smell group, explained investigators, was confined to women because women typically have a better sense of smell than men and are also more sensitive to emotional signaling.

After analyzing the facial expressions of the smell group, the research team concluded that there does, in fact, appear to be a so-called "behavioral synchronization" between a sweating person's emotional state, the sweat generated, and the reaction of the person who sniffs that sweat.

Specifically, that meant that the faces of women who smelled "happy sweat" displayed facial muscle activity deemed to be representative of happiness.

Sweat didn't always produce a contagious response in the smeller, however. For example, those smellers who verbalized having a "pleasant" or "intense" reaction to a sweat sample did not manifest those reactions in their facial expressions.

What is it exactly that makes "happy sweat" infectious?

Semin, who is also professor of social and behavioral sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, acknowledged that "we have not demonstrated what the nature of the chemical compound is in sweat."

Pamela Dalton is an olfactory (smell sense) scientist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She said she found the findings "a little surprising."

However, "what is interesting about this study is that it suggests a positive emotion can be communicated -- which in my opinion is far less important in human evolution and behavior than to be able to transmit and recognize a negative emotion, such as fear or anger," Dalton said.

For that reason, Dalton said she "would expect the ability to communicate a happy emotion to [actually] be less potent than the ability to transmit a negative emotion."

But Andreas Keller, a research associate with The Rockefeller University in New York City, said the study findings make intuitive sense.

"Hearing happy people and seeing happy people makes you happier," he said, "so the fact that smelling them would make you happier, too, is probably not so surprising."

According to Keller, the next step "would be to find out what the chemical difference in fear sweat and happy sweat is that mediates these effects. This would open the door to study what is going on at a mechanistic level."

More information

There's more on the human sense of smell at the Social Issues Research Center.

SOURCES: Gun R. Semin, research professor, department of psychology, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey; and Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisbon, Portugal, and professor, social and behavioral sciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Pamela Dalton, Ph.D., M.P.H., olfactory scientist, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, Pa.; Andreas Keller, Ph.D., research associate, The Rockefeller University, New York City; April 13, 2015 (online), Psychological Science

Good news for freedom

Rights group says defamation case has been dropped against prominent Angolan journalist

 By LYNSEY CHUTEL, Associated Press

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A prominent Angolan journalist, jailed for his criticism of the government, has been released, a human rights group said on Thursday.

The criminal case against Rafael Marques de Morais has been stopped, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group said. The reasons for the action are still unclear, said the group. Marques had been out on bail.

"This is an absolutely stunning turnaround," said Jeffrey Smith, Africa director of the Robert F. Kennedy group, lauding Marques' courage. "He stood face to face with Angola's most powerful and dangerous men, and he did not blink."

The journalist and human rights activist went on trial in March this year after a group of generals accused him of defamation, according to Marques' news website, Maka Angola.

The generals' accusations stem from Marques' 2011 book, "Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola." In it, Marques alleges more than 100 killings and 500 torture cases carried out by a private security firm owned by the generals, according to Maka Angola. Marques also accuses the Angolan Armed Forces of human rights abuses that took place in the country's diamond mining regions.

Marques asked the Angolan attorney general to investigate the allegations, according to an article on Maka Angola. The attorney general interviewed the alleged victims, but set the case aside. The generals in turn laid multiple charges of libel and defamation against Marques.

Marques faced up to nine years in jail or could have been fined up to $1.2 million in damages.

The walrus and the carpenteer

By Lewis Carrol

The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright—

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,

Because she thought the sun

Had got no business to be there

After the day was done—

“It’s very rude of him,” she said,

“To come and spoil the fun!”

The sea was wet as wet could be,

The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud, because

No cloud was in the sky:

No birds were flying over head—

There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of sand:

“If this were only cleared away,”

They said, “it WOULD be grand!”

“If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

“That they could get it clear?”

“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,

And shed a bitter tear.

“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

The Walrus did beseech.

“A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

Along the briny beach:

We cannot do with more than four,

To give a hand to each.”

The eldest Oyster looked at him.

But never a word he said:

The eldest Oyster winked his eye,

And shook his heavy head—

Meaning to say he did not choose

To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young oysters hurried up,

All eager for the treat:

Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,

Their shoes were clean and neat—

And this was odd, because, you know,

They hadn’t any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,

And yet another four;

And thick and fast they came at last,

And more, and more, and more—

All hopping through the frothy waves,

And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Walked on a mile or so,

And then they rested on a rock

Conveniently low:

And all the little Oysters stood

And waited in a row.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—

Of cabbages—-and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings.”

“But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,

“Before we have our chat;

For some of us are out of breath,

And all of us are fat!”

“No hurry!” said the Carpenter.

They thanked him much for that.

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,

“Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

Are very good indeed—

Now if you’re ready Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.”

“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,

Turning a little blue,

“After such kindness, that would be

A dismal thing to do!”

“The night is fine,” the Walrus said

“Do you admire the view?

"It was so kind of you to come!

And you are very nice!”

The Carpenter said nothing but

“Cut us another slice:

I wish you were not quite so deaf—

I’ve had to ask you twice!”

“It seems a shame,” the Walrus said,

“To play them such a trick,

After we’ve brought them out so far,

And made them trot so quick!”

The Carpenter said nothing but

“The butter’s spread too thick!”

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said.

“I deeply sympathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size.

Holding his pocket handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter.

“You’ve had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?”

But answer came there none—

And that was scarcely odd, because

They’d eaten every one.

Thoreau, my fellow New Englander, is a favorite of mine and has been since I was a teen.

“Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” Henry David Thoreau 

 “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” Henry David Thoreau

Relax and Breathe

If you want to enjoy your life today …

1. Make peace with the past and decide to let it go.

2. Choose to be present and to focus on this moment.

3. Smile and laugh often; enjoy the little things.

4. Be positive and grateful; remember ALL life’s blessings.

5. Don’t allow other people to affect your happiness.

6. Don’t listen to, or ruminate on, empty lies and gossip.

7. Be patient in your struggles - and know that trials end.

Poem to Be Read at 3 A.M. - Donald Justice 

Excepting the diner

 On the outskirts

 The town of Ladora

 At 3 A.M.

 Was dark but

 For my headlights

 And up in

 One second-story room

 A single light

 Where someone

 Was sick or

 Perhaps reading

 As I drove past

 At seventy

 Not thinking

 This poem

 Is for whoever

 Had the light on

Actor Robert DeNiro's moving words to the creative class..............

Our pool

We live in a condo that has pool, a complete gym, sauna room, dressing room showers and a Jacuzzi........and nobody uses it. It's empty most of the time. Yet state law says we have to have a life guard man the area for the three months that it's open. She works from 10:00 AM to 9:PM watching over an empty pool...crazy.
   

On writing

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

                                                                                                 John Steinbeck

“It’s a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.” Gary Reilly

“Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.”  W.H. Auden

“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave  anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the  genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.” Pat Conroy

 “I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.” Joan Didion

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself…It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent”     

                                                                                                                               Harper Lee

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.”

                                                                                               Gerald Brenan

 “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it?”

                                                            Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

Words like Freedom by Langston Hughes

Words like Freedom by Langston Hughes

“There are words like Freedom

Sweet and wonderful to say.

On my heartstrings freedom sings

All day everyday.

There are words like Liberty

That almost make me cry.

If you had known what I know

You would know why.”

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.”  Tennessee Williams

My dog Bart, Out Law

Garbage stealing dog

Fla'

This very good idea...a poverty czar appointed to end poverty in America...has been around for 50 years, what the hell is the hold up?

Obama pressed to appoint poverty czar

By Jesse Byrnes -

The White House is being pressed to appoint a poverty czar in the wake of President Obama’s recent remarks on income inequality.

Those advocating for the White House to place a stronger emphasis on tackling poverty in the United States are also eyeing support among 2016 presidential hopefuls.

Proponents hope appointing someone to fill the role, which was proposed a number of years ago before Barack Obama was first elected president but has so far failed to take root, could come to fruition in the near future.

Long advocated by the family of Martin Luther King Jr., the interagency poverty chief could be much like those appointed to handle issues such as climate change, AIDS, the auto industry or, more recently, Ebola.

“As my father often said, ‘The time is always right to do what is right,’ ” Martin Luther King III, the son of the civil rights leader, said in a statement shared with The Hill on Monday.

“There is no more important time to appoint a poverty czar than now,” King said.

King, along with others, pushed the idea during the 2008 presidential race. At the time, around of the 40th anniversary of his father’s assassination, he called on those running for president to commit to establishing the position.

Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, announced during her White House campaign that as president she would create the senior spot, adding, “No more excuses, no more whining, but instead a concerted effort.”

“Hillary did it, Obama refused,” a person familiar with conversations surrounding the pledge told The Hill.

Since Obama took office, he has appointed a record number of czars, but none for poverty, the source noted, adding the president “seems unwilling to do anything with audacity.”

The White House pushed back on that assertion.

“President Obama’s deep and firm commitment to tackling the complex issue of poverty has been evident through the policies he has championed consistently over the past six years,” a White House official said.

The official pointed to policies implemented by Obama and his aides on economic security, education and healthcare, which “helped keep between 3.9 million and 5.7 million Americans per year out of poverty during the recovery.”

In addition to Clinton, whose campaign did not return a request for comment for this report, advocates for a poverty czar are turning to GOP hopefuls for support.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), among others, have all spoken on the issue of poverty in favorable terms.

Others don’t put much stock in the need for creating the post.

“The only job that is guaranteed from appointing a ‘poverty czar’ is the position of poverty czar,” said Deana Bass, a spokeswoman for Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon and Tea Party activist running to become the GOP presidential nominee. 

More than 45 million Americans lived below the poverty line last year, the third consecutive year around that level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Obama discussed at length the topic of poverty during a panel discussion at Georgetown University last week, in which he acknowledged “class segregation” forcing negative views of the rich and poor, the latter being painted as “sponges, leaches.”

“I think we can all stipulate that the best antipoverty program is a job,” Obama said, adding that a job “confers not just income, but structure and dignity and a sense of connection to community.”

“I think it is a mistake for us to suggest that somehow every effort we make has failed and we are powerless to address poverty. That’s just not true,” Obama said.

“Just in absolute terms, the poverty rate when you take into account tax and transfer programs, has been reduced about 40 percent since 1967,” he said.

Robert Doar, who studies poverty at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed that greater attention should be given to the topic, pointing out a steady rise in the poverty rate since 2000 amid a fall in median household incomes.

“Hopefully the [czar] would be willing to consider ideas which have shown to reduce poverty, such as work requirements for people receiving assistance, work supports that make work pay, and a greater emphasis on the need for two active and involved parents in every child’s life,” Doar wrote in an email, referring to a potential poverty czar.

Obama similarly maintained during a speech in Camden, N.J., on Monday that focused on police relations that intact households, jobs and investments in minority areas are integral to communities not being “isolated and segregated.”

“There is more work to do and the president remains steadfast in his efforts to expand opportunity for low-income Americans and their children,” the White House official told The Hill.

Such a position could also have some support in Congress.

“Appointing a senior level official solely devoted to addressing and ending poverty in America is major and exciting step forward and gives me hope that ending poverty is becoming a national priority,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a statement to The Hill.

Lee, who chairs a House leadership task force focused on poverty and works with another within the Congressional Black Caucus, indicated she supported developing a “coordinated national strategy to build pathways into the middle class” for the poor.

“When the auto industry needed a bail-out we had an auto czar. When just one person in America contracted Ebola, we got an Ebola czar,” former Rep. Andrew Young (D-Ga.), who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and has urged the creation of the position, said in a statement.

“It is time for the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to afford housing and basic necessities to know that the president has empowered a senior official to be wholly devoted to implementing solutions to poverty.”

 “Near yonder copse, where once the garden smil’d,

And still where many a garden flower grows wild;

There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose,

The village Preacher’s modest mansion rose.

A man he was to all the country dear,

And passing rich with forty pounds a year;

Remote from towns he ran his godly race,

Nor e'er had changed, nor wish’d to change, his place;

Unpractis’d he to fawn, or seek for power,

By doctrines fashion’d to the varying hour;

Far other aims his heart had learn’d to prize,

More skill’d to raise the wretched than to rise.

His house was known to all the vagrant train,

He chid their wanderings, but reliev’d their pain;

The long-remember’d beggar was his guest,

Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;

The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,

Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allow’d;

The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

Sat by his fire, and talked the night away;

[3]

Wept o'er his wounds, or tales of sorrow done,

Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.

Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,

And quite forgot their vices in their woe;

Careless their merits or their faults to scan,

He pity gave ere charity began.”

—         The Village Preacher - Olivier Goldsmith