There is growing evidence that humans use olfactory chemosensory signals for social communication, but their role in affective associative learning is largely unknown. To examine this, women implicitly learned face-odor associations by pairing different neutral male faces with either a male chemosignal presumably involved in human mating behavior (dissolved Androstadienone, "AND"), a pleasant smell (dissolved vanillin) or the neutral solvent alone. After learning, women rated faces previously paired with AND or vanillin as more attractive than faces paired with solvent, even though they were unable to identify the contingency of face-odor pairings above chance level. On a neurophysiological level, both AND- and vanillin-associated faces evoked stronger magnetoencephalographic correlates of enhanced emotional attention than solvent-associated faces at early (<120 ms) and mid-latency (140-270 ms) processing stages. This study stresses the role of AND as a human chemosignal in implicit social communication and demonstrates its effectiveness in modulating emotional learning.

中文翻译：

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妇女表现出更高的吸引力等级，并且对与男性化学感应信号相关的男性面孔进行神经处理

越来越多的证据表明，人类使用嗅觉化学感应信号进行社交交流，但是人们在情感联想学习中的作用却鲜为人知。为了检验这一点，女性通过将不同的中性男性面孔与可能参与人类交配行为的男性化学信号（溶解的雄甾烷酮，“ AND”），令人愉悦的气味（溶解的香兰素）或单独的中性溶剂配对，暗中了解了面部气味的关联。经过学习，女性认为以前与AND或香兰素配对的脸部比与溶剂配对的脸部更具吸引力，即使她们无法识别出机会水平以上的面部气味配对的偶然性。在神经生理学层面上，在早期（<120毫秒）和中潜伏期（140-270毫秒）处理阶段，与溶剂相关的面孔相比，与AND和香兰素相关的面孔都引起了增强的情感注意力的更强的脑磁图相关性。这项研究强调了AND在隐性社会沟通中作为人类化学信号的作用，并证明了其在调节情绪学习中的有效性。