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The purpose of this project is to validate the Social Odor Scale (SOS, Dal Bò et al., 2021) in several languages to promote its use across different countries, languages, and cultures. The SOS takes the form of a self-administered questionnaire where participants indicate their level of agreement with 12 propositions to assess one’s awareness of the social odor surroundings. Its short format makes it easy to implement in research protocols, for basic or clinical assays. It is already available in Italian and in German (Dal Bò et al., 2021, Plos One). Broadening the availability of the SOS across languages will help standardize the research procedures on body odor collection and perception across research laboratories, ultimately supporting the creation of directly comparable research results. The SOS score can help to phenotype both social odor donors and recipients based on their ability to be tuned in to body odors, and it can thus serve as correlate to the behavioral, psychophysiological, neural, and clinical data. Body odor research has been of great interest in several countries, including most prominently Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States of America. Therefore, in this first standardization study, we include representatives of research groups from these countries to drive this set of translations of the SOS. The present study thus aims to validate translations of the SOS in: French, Dutch, Swedish and English, additionally to the Italian and German translation that has already been published (Dal Bò et al., 2021). In this study, we aim to determine whether the factor structure of each translation remains similar to the validated Italian version (Dal Bò et al., 2021): one higher-order factor representing social odor awareness in general and three lower-order factors representing Familiar, Partner, and Stranger social odors. In addition to evaluating the persistence of the three-factor structure of each translation, we will determine the convergent and divergent validity of the SOS. Several odor scales are already available in the literature. To test the convergent validity, we chose 1) the Body Odor Sniffing Questionnaire (BOSQ, Li et al., 2022), a 17-item questionnaire focusing on how much one smells self-private (e.g. Do you ever sniff/smell your own hands?), others’ (e.g., Do you ever sniff/smell your friends?) and self-common body odors (e.g., Do you ever smell the pillows/quilts you have- slept on?) ; and 2) the Odor Awareness Scale (Smeets et al., 2008), a 32-item questionnaire on one’s awareness of odors in general in the environment (e.g., Do you sniff at a new book?). To test the divergent validity, we chose to use the visual subscale (v) of the Sensory Sensitivity Scales (SeSS, Aykan et al., 2020) which includes among others a 10-item questionnaire addressing visual sensitivity independent of social dimensions (e.g., I feel the need to squint my eyes in bright sunlight).

Previous literature has shown that affective disorders, such as depression and anxiety, are associated with reduced olfactory functioning (Burón & Bulbena, 2013; Kohli, Soler, Nguyen, Muus, & Schlosser, 2016; Taalman, Wallace, & Milev, 2017). This association has been explained by the partial overlap between brain areas involved in olfactory processing and brain areas associated with the pathophysiology of affective disorders, such as the limbic system and prefrontal structures (Kadohisa, 2013; Zhang, Chang, Guo, Zhang, & Wang, 2013). However, very few studies have investigated these patients’ tendency to note or pay attention to olfactory information in everyday life. Previous studies in healthy individuals demonstrated that better olfactory abilities and higher reactivity to smells are associated with olfactory awareness (Smeets, Schifferstein, Boelema, & Lensvelt-Mulders, 2008). In the same line, odor awareness has been positively associated with the impact of olfactory stimuli on emotions, cognition, and behavior (Arshamian, Willander, & Larsson, 2011; Burón, Bulbena, Barrada, & Pailhez, 2013; Burón, Bulbena, Pailhez, & Cabré, 2011). Recently, the olfactory sensitivity, the reactivity to odors, and olfactory awareness have been investigated in relation to depression and anxiety scales (Burón et al., 2013) and in patients with panic disorder (Burón, Bulbena, & Bulbena-Cabré, 2015): enhanced reactivity to odors as well as a greater olfactory awareness have been found with increased anxiety ratings and in patients with panic disorder. However, the scales used in these studies only partially explored the awareness for social odors. Social odors are a form of communication among conspecifics that transfers socially relevant information (Parma et al., 2017; Wyatt, 2014). It has been demonstrated that social odors are able to carry social information such as age, gender, health status, sexual availability, personal predisposition (Martins et al., 2005; McClintock et al., 2005; Mitro, Gordon, Olsson, Lundström, & Vainius, 2012; Parma et al., 2017), and emotional status that can modulate the behavior and the affective state of the receiver (de Groot & Smeets, 2017). Even though there are studies showing that socially anxious individuals report higher reactivity to social odors than controls (Adolph, Meister, & Pause, 2013; Pause, Adolph, Prehn-Kristensen, & Ferstl, 2009; Zhou, Hou, Zhou, & Chen, 2011), the social odor awareness in patients with affective disorders have not been previously assessed.

use of EMDR techniques to test the effect on adversive social memories and on social anxiety symptoms

All extracted data journal and article-level data for the manuscript Nutu, D., Gentili, C., Naudet, F., Cristea, I.A. (2019) "Open Science Practices in Clinical Psychology Journals: An Audit Study". Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Previous literature posited that human behavior is driven by the motivation to approach rewards and the motivation to avoid threats. The so-called approach and avoidance motivational systems are independent and separate, but they interact in orienting responses to emotional stimuli and in influencing ongoing affect (Lang et al., 1998). More recently, this model has been applied to the domain of social motivation (Gable, 2006). According to this model, approach social goals (e.g., “to make friends”) and avoidance social goals (e.g., “to not be lonely”) represent dispositional constructs that stimulate appetitive and aversive behaviour, respectively (Gable & Gosnell, 2013). Depression and social anxiety are mental disorders both characterized by impaired social functioning. Social anxiety is characterized by intense fear and avoidance of social situations (Hofmann & Bogels, 2006), and it has been associated with increased activity of the defensive motivational system (Davidson et al., 2000; Nusslock et al., 2015). Conversely, depressive disorders are characterized by anhedonia, apathy, and psychomotor retardation, which seem to be associated with hypoactivation of the appetitive motivational system (Henriques & Davidson, 1990; Stewart et al., 2010), resulting in a reduced propensity for approach-related action tendencies. Notably, humans transfer socially-relevant information (such as age, health status, and personality traits) and emotional states via body odors (also referred to as chemosignals) (Parma et al., 2017; Pause, 2012, 2017). Within the emotional states, individuals exposed to body odors report a partial reproduction of the affective, perceptual, and behavioral state of the sender, in a phenomenon called as “emotional contagion” (Semin, 2007). For example, anxiety chemosignals induce in the receivers an increase in withdrawal behaviors (measured by the startle reflex, Pause et al., 2009), a reduction in the perceptual acuity to happy facial expressions (Pause et al., 2004; Zernecke et al., 2011) and an augmented acuity to negative facial expressions (Zhou & Chen, 2009). On the other side, happiness body odors can induce in the receivers a happier facial expression than neutral body odors and a global processing style, which is typical under positive mood conditions (de Groot et al., 2015). However, despite the ability of body odors to convey emotional information, their role as a context in the processing of emotional stimuli is still widely unknown. Given the role of odors as powerful emotional stimuli and their role in affecting the subjective perceptual experiences and the psychophysiological processing of emotional stimuli, this project aims to investigate whether happiness and fear body odors could modulate subjective and psychophysiological processing of neutral facial expression in individuals with symptoms of depression and in individuals with symptoms of social anxiety.

A century-long debate on bodily states and emotions persists. While the involvement of bodily activity in emotion physiology is widely recognized, the specificity and causal role of such activity related to brain dynamics has not yet been demonstrated. We hypothesize that the peripheral neural control on cardiovascular activity prompts and sustains brain dynamics during an emotional experience, so these afferent inputs are processed by the brain by triggering a concurrent efferent information transfer to the body. To this end, we investigated the functional brain–heart interplay under emotion elicitation in publicly available data from 62 healthy subjects using a computational model based on synthetic data generation of electroencephalography and electrocardiography signals. Our findings show that sympathovagal activity plays a leading and causal role in initiating the emotional response, in which ascending modulations from vagal activity precede neural dynamics and correlate to the reported level of arousal. The subsequent dynamic interplay observed between the central and autonomic nervous systems sustains the processing of emotional arousal. These findings should be particularly revealing for the psychophysiology and neuroscience of emotions.