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Fear is the key
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A recent study has found that women perform better when they feel afraid
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BETTER KNACK Fear helps women
Women can unconsciously detect the smell of fear, new research suggests, and the smell improves their performance on mental tasks.
Scientists collected sweat from seven volunteers — four men and three women — who watched horror movies while holding gauze pads in their armpits. Then, their sweat was collected while they watched videos with neutral emotional content.
Sixty-eight women next performed a word-association task while smelling the pads. The task involved watching two words flash on a screen one after the other, and then stating whether the two words were related.
The subjects were divided into three groups: The first smelled the sweat pads of sweat collected during the frightening video; the second smelled pads collected during the neutral video; and the third, a control group, smelled pads with no sweat on them.
Without sacrificing speed, the women smelling the fear pads were more accurate than those in the other two groups when processing meaningful related words.
Denise Chen, the study's lead author, says she believes that it was the smell of fear that improved performance.
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