Nosewitness identification: effects of negative emotion.
prospective_cohort · Level II
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 25612211.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0116706 and PMC identifier 4303424.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Every individual has a unique body odor (BO), similar to a fingerprint. In forensic research, identification of culprit BOs has been performed by trained dogs, but not by humans. We introduce the concept of nosewitness identification and present the first experimental results on BO memory in witness situations involving violent crimes. Two experiments indicated that BO associated with male characters in authentic videos could later be identified in BO lineup tests well above chance. Moreover, culprit BO in emotional crime videos could be identified considerably better than the BO of a male person in neutral videos. This indicates that nosewitness identification benefits from emotional encoding. Altogether, the study testifies to the virtue of body odor as a cue to identify individuals observed under negative emotion.
Medical subject headings
- Emotions
- Memory
- Odorants
- Olfactory Perception
- Smell