Enhanced chemosensory detection of negative emotions in congenital blindness

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that congenitally blind individuals develop superior sensory abilities in order to compensate for their lack of vision. Substantial research has been done on somatosensory and auditory sensory information processing of the blind. However, relatively little information is available about compensatory plasticity in the olfactory domain. Although previous studies indicate that blind individuals have superior olfactory abilities, no studies so far have investigated their sense of smell in relation to social and affective communication. The current study compares congenitally blind and normal sighted individuals in their ability to discriminate and identify emotions from body odours. A group of 14 congenitally blind and 14 age- and sex-matched sighted control subjects participated in the study. We compared participants' abilities to detect and identify by smelling sweat from donors who had been watching excerpts from emotional movies showing amusement, fear, disgust, or sexual arousal. Our results show that congenitally blind subjects outperformed sighted controls in identifying fear from male donors. In addition, there was a strong tendency that blind individuals were also better in detecting disgust. Our findings reveal that congenitally blind individuals are better at identifying ecologically important emotions and provide new insights into the mechanisms of social and affective communication in blindness.