Women likely to smell loved ones’ clothing

For 77 out of 108 female undergraduates at Pitt, something smells, and it’s not the city’s… For 77 out of 108 female undergraduates at Pitt, something smells, and it’s not the city’s sewers.

Instead, these women willingly admit to smelling their loved ones clothing when separated from them, according to a new study conducted through Pitt’s psychology department.

Although this fact may seem trivial to young women who often pine for their boyfriends, it plays a pivotal role in Pitt professor Sybil Streeter’s and professor emeritus Donald McBurney’s research.

Based on their own personal experiences, Streeter and McBurney wondered exactly how many people engage in relationship-provoked sniffs and if the action exists across the globe.

Their findings, published last year in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, conclude that women and men worldwide smell clothing as a source of comfort during committed relationships.

McBurney and Streeter worked with Harald Euler, a psychology professor at the University of Kassel in Germany, to survey people’s olfactory tendencies.

While only 29 and 26 percent of men in Germany and the United States, respectively, smelled clothing, 66 percent of German women and 72 percent of American women said yes to seeking out someone else’s aroma.

McBurney doubts that the statistics would differ in non-Western cultures or other parts of the world, although the team conducted research only in the cities of Pittsburgh and Kassel, Germany.

The similar results from the two distant locations show that both sexes prove the researchers’ curiosities on this phenomenon of love.

“It does indeed appear that women engage in these behaviors more than men do,” Streeter said, according to a University press release. “Some colleagues suggest that men may be less willing to admit it, but we’ve gone to great lengths to rule out that possibility.”

Before this study, no previous research detailed how many people smelled clothing.

“Smell is a very important aspect of human behavior, but one that is not studied much,” McBurney said. “We think there is a lot to be studied.”

Steeler continues her works with the concept of scent in relation to human relationships, preparing a dissertation on how personalities and adult attachment styles relate to the sense of smell and to smelling behaviors.

The research will help bring understanding as to why people do certain things in order to feel close to others, according to McBurney. It also infuses scent into psychology’s understanding of the important factors of close relationships, he said.