Scared Enough to Think Straight

Posted on April 2, 2006 in Anxiety

Women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all….

When processing word pairs that were ambiguous in threat content, such as one neutral word paired with a threatening word or a pair of neutral words, subjects in the fear condition were 15 to 16 percent slower in responding than those in the neutral sweat condition, and this difference was statistically significant. Chen’s theory is that the chemicals from fear-induced sweat prompted subjects to be more cautious.

Any of us who have suffered hypervigilance or paranoia knows how true this is. The way the eyes flash or the head jerks from looking at us leads us to suspect malice. Maybe the dirty clothes we wear because we are depressed keeps us down? We stink of our dread.