Our brains detect anxiety in the smell of other people's sweat even if we aren't conscious of it.
The communication of stress/anxiety through chemosensory signals has been documented in many vertebrates and invertebrates.
Researchers investigated how chemosensory anxiety signals conveyed by the sweat of humans awaiting an academic examination are processed by the human brain, as compared to chemosensory control signals obtained from the same sweat donors in a sport condition.
The chemosensory perception of human anxiety seems to automatically recruit empathy-related reactions even though the participants could not attentively differentiate the chemosensory stimuli.
Emotional contagion seems to be effectively mediated by the olfactory system.
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