Mother-daughter olfaction identification

Research was undertaken to see if it is possible for females to identify their mother or daughter by olfactory cues alone. Twenty-two females, 11 daughters and 11 mothers, participated in the experiment. Mothers ranged in age from 37 to 46 and daughters ranged in age from 11 to 21. Each subject was blindfolded and asked to smell (hairline level) the necks of two different individuals. The individuals consisted of one relative (a mother or a daughter) and one control subject. Each subject, of course, was asked to identify her relative. Seventeen of the 22 subjects correctly identified her relative (p < .01, 2-tailed binomial test). A second experiment was administered to determine if subjects could correctly distinguish between cotton pads that had been placed, for the duration of experiment one, under the arm of another subject and under that of a relative. Fifteen of the 22 subjects correctly identified the cotton pad of their relative, (p <.05, 2-tailed binomial test). The null hypothesis that there would not be a statistically significant difference in the number of females able to recognize their mother or daughter and those who could not was rejected. The study of human olfaction and how people incorporate this sense into their behavior has been very difficult. "One reason is that, for the most part, odor perception functions without conscious awareness while monitoring the chemical environment" (Engen, 1991, p.xii). New information on human behavior is often found by studying animal behavior. "At the level of insects, ants and bees regularly transmit information throughout the nest by chemical signals, and various animals such as rats, mice, rabbits, and dogs control at least some of their social activities by means of chemical messengers. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to suppose that at the human level we retain some vestiges of a primitive ability to pass information from person to person by means of body emanations" (Wright, 1982, p. 140). Williams and Groux (1993) have found that rats avoid certain fear odors emitted by other rats who have been exposed to stress. Filiatre, Eckerlin, Millot, and Montagner (1990) studied the behavior of dogs with children and found that olfaction is not only part of their communication system but also an enabler for dogs to decode and integrate human behaviors and to possibly recognize the emotional states that underlie them. Wright (1982) also suggests that it is possible for experienced police dogs to recognize what emotional state an individual is in by his or her body odor. One area of animal and human subliminal chemical communication that has been researched is menstrual synchronization. It has been suggested that women are more odor sensitive than men and further are more sensitive during ovulation than during menstruation. There is more mucus present at the olfactory epithelium during menstruation that prevent odors from reaching the receptors (Engen, 1991). Female rats, monkeys and humans have been studied with findings indicating that airborne chemical and/or hormone communication may account for menstrual synchronization of females that are living or working together (Graham, 1991; Wallis, King, & Roth-Meyer, 1986). It has been suggested that olfaction may play an important role in the bonding of human infants and mothers (Porter, Cernoch, & Perry, 1983; Schaal, 1988). Porter et al. (1983) found that 13 out of 17 mothers could correctly distinguish their newborn infant's shirts from another infant's shirt after a mean exposure to their infant of only 2.4 hours. Schaal found that infants would orient their faces for a significantly longer time toward a breast pad worn by their own mother compared to a donor's breast pad. Schaal also reports on a study by H. Montagner that found 18 out of 26 children, ages 3.5 to 4.5 years old, could distinguish between MODERN PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES 13