Smelling Moms’ Scent May Help Infants Bond With Strangers-
Even if the mother isn’t around, traces of her body odor on clothing may increase a child’s trust and comfort with others.
The following written content by Corryn Wetzel
Babies don’t make it easy on moms. They cry, whine and hold on for dear life if their mother tries to even leave the room. But a new study suggests an easy solution to help loosen one of the strongest forces in nature, the bond between mother and infant: a worn piece of clothing.
According to research published today in Science Advances, chemical signals in a mother’s unique scent may help infants bond with strangers, even when the mom is absent.
In the study, babies were exposed to their mother’s body odor via a worn t-shirt while interacting with a stranger. The infants that had their mother’s scent present, versus those exposed to a clean t-shirt, were able to bond with the new adult more easily, a finding that may help parents share child-rearing duties. “What’s so exciting about it is that we can delegate parenting to those we live with,” says Ruth Feldman, a social neuroscientist at Reisman University in Israel, and co-author of the study. By simply having the scent of the mother present, the results suggest, another adult can fulfill a similar role in a child’s social and emotional development.
Body odor helps us connect with and understand others, explains Feldman. “From an evolutionary perspective, what is the secret to Homo sapien’s survival, thriving and conquest of the world: our capacity to communicate,” she says. But our sense of smell, which was one of the first senses humans evolved, has often been overlooked in the study of infant-parent communication compared to vision and hearing.
One reason social smells are less studied is logistical: scents are complex and hard to manipulate in a lab. Body odor isn’t a single scent, but rather a cocktail of chemical signals. Another reason smells are less studied is because humans are unconsciously sampling the smell of our surroundings all the time, says Eva Mishor, a neuroscientist at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who wasn’t involved in the work. Smells “affect our mental state, our brain activity, our hormonal state and our social interactions,” often without us noticing. “But if we look at the main decisions that we make in life, if it’s what to eat, who should we mate with—sense of smell is a very important part of this,” she says. Read more from Smithsonian.
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