PHEROMONES
WHAT ARE PHEROMONES ?
FACTS ABOUT PHEROMONES
• Pheromones are similar to hormones but work outside of the body
• Pheromones induce activity in other individuals, such as sexual
arousal
• The McClintock effect refers to women's menstrual cycles combining,
perhaps in response to pheromones
• Some chemicals have been investigated for pheromone actions in
humans but evidence is weak
• Virtually all insects use pheromones to communicate
• Most alleged pheromone products that can be purchased online are
ineffective
• Gustav Jäger was the first to propose the idea of pheromones - he
called them atropines
• There are four types of pheromone: releaser, primer, signaler and
modulator.
DO HUMANS HAVE PHEROMONES ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqftxptfm7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfizpfBwYng
RELATED STUDIES –Wedekind (1995)
Evaluation
STUDY 2 – ZHOU et.al (2014)
STRENGTHS
SO HUMANS HAVE PHEROMONES ?
ARGUMENTS FOR PHEROMONES
• Other mammals have them.
• We also secrete scents like other mammals.
• There is some evidence that babies respond
to pheromones in order to find their mother's
breast and engage in rooting behaviour. See
the study by Doucet (2005) in the textbook.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST PHEROMONES
• Generalizations from animal research have not proven to be valid.
• Human mating behavior is influenced by cognitive and sociocultural factors - including learned experience and
social norms.
• Studies on pheromones have often not been replicated.
• Smells are not necessarily pheromones. There is often a problem of construct validity in research on
pheromones.
• Research also tends to have small sample sizes.
• There is an inability to eliminate the effect of other variables that may influence human scent - eg. bacteria and
diet.
• Humans do not appear to have a functional VSO which other animals use to detect pheromones.
• The human process of scent detection is very complex and is difficult to study.
• The human scent is complex and made up of many different molecules. No one has yet mapped all of those
molecules.
) Hare et al (2017)
• He investigated whether androstadienone (AND) and estratetraenol (EST)—the best-known
candidates for human sex pheromones— signal gender and affect mate perception.
• The experiment used a repeated measures design.
• Heterosexual participants completed two computer-based tasks twice on two consecutive days.
• While completing the task, on one of the days they were exposed to the putative pheromone (AND
or EST) masked with clove oil, and on the other days they were exposed to a control scent (clove oil
only).
• Substances were administered by a cotton ball taped under the nose throughout the task. The
design was counterbalanced (some participants had the pheromone on the first day and the control
substance on the second day, some vice versa).
• The first computer-based task involved showing the participants five “gender-
neutral facial morphs”, and participants had to indicate the gender (male or
female).
• In the second task participants were shown opposite-sex photographs and
asked to rate them for attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10. The study was
double-blinded. There were two experimenters—a male and a female—and they
alternated for different sessions.
• Results of the first task revealed no difference in gender assigned to the
morphed faces in the pheromone versus control condition.
• Similarly, results of the second task revealed no difference in the average
attractiveness ratings of opposite sex photos. The authors concluded that AND
and EST do not act as signals of gender or of attractiveness, which means that
they do not qualify as sex pheromones. Incidentally, the gender of the
experimenter had no effect on the results.
