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Dentists can smell your fear – and it may put your teeth at risk KEEP calm. Dentists can smell when a patient is anxious and it makes them more prone to errors, according to a study of dental students. The finding is the first real-world evidence that chemical signals in our body odor can betray our emotions and influence the behavior of those around us, says Valentina Parma at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. Many lab experiments have found that the odors of people who are feeling emotions – particularly negative ones like disgust and fear – can influence our perception of them. This happens even though we can rarely pinpoint why or describe what we are smelling. To find a more realistic setting for investigating this effect, Parma’s team turned to dentistry, since the people dentists treat are often anxious. The researchers asked 24 student volunteers to each donate a T-shirt they had worn during a stressful exam, and another worn at a calm lecture. The team doused the T-shirts with a chemical that masks body odour, so that no one could consciously smell it. A separate group of 24 dental students said they couldn’t detect any difference between the two sets of shirts. Next, examiners graded the dental students as they carried out treatments on mannequins dressed in the donated T-shirts. The students scored significantly worse when the mannequins were wearing T- shirts from stressful contexts. Mistakes included being more likely to damage teeth next to the ones they were working on (Chemical Senses, doi.org/cpz4). Parma thinks the scent of anxiety could be triggering the same emotion in those who subconsciously smell it. “It’s quite fascinating,” says Pamela Dalton at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “It helps us understand how we can communicate without language.” The phenomenon is likely to occur in other settings, too. Doctors might also be ab