Gün R Semin

ISPA Instituto Universitário | ISPA · William James Center for Research

A growing body of research suggests that emotional chemosignals in others’ body odour (BO), particularly those sampled during fearful states, enhance emotional face perception in conscious and preconscious stages. For instance, emotional faces access visual awareness faster when presented with others’ fear BOs. However, the effect of these emotiona...

Fear and anxiety are the most frequently studied emotional states in chemosignal research. Despite differences between these two emotional states, findings from research using fear and anxiety body odors (BOs) are often treated as part of a similar phenomenon. In this article, we examine possible similarities and differences between participants ex...

We report an observational, double-blind, experimental study that examines the effects of human emotional odors on puppies between 3 and 6 months and adult dogs (one year and upwards). Both groups were exposed to control, human fear, and happiness odors in a between subjects' design. The duration of all behaviors directed to the apparatus, the door...

Recently, Shirai and Watanabe Royal Society Open Science, 9(1), 211128 (2022) developed OBNIS (Open Biological Nega- tive Image Set), a comprehensive database containing images (primarily animals but also fruits, mushrooms, and vegeta- bles) that visually elicit disgust, fear, or neither. OBNIS was initially validated for a Japanese population. In...

Rapidly evaluating our environment's beneficial and detrimental features is critical for our successful functioning. A classic paradigm used to investigate such fast and automatic evaluations is the affective priming (AP) paradigm, where participants classify valenced target stimuli (e.g., words) as good or bad while ignoring the valenced primes (e...

To date, odor research has primarily focused on the behavioral effects of common odors on consumer perception and choices. We report a study that examines, for the first time, the effects of human body odor cues on consumer purchase behaviors. The influence of human chemosignals produced in three conditions, namely happiness, fear, a relaxed condit...

We report an observational, double-blind study that examined puppies’ behaviors while engaged in solving an experimental food retrieval task (food retrieval task instrument: FRTI). The experimental setting included passive social distractors (i.e., the dog’s owner and a stranger). The focus was on how the social and physical environment shapes pupp...

Cultural routines, such as reading and writing direction (script direction), channel attention orientation. Depending on one's native language habit, attention is biased from left-to-right (LR) or from right-to-left (RL). Here, we further document this bias as it interacts with the spatial directionality that grounds time concepts. We used a spatia...

We illustrate the problematic nature of different assumptions guiding the examination of whether humans can detect the source of fear chemosignals (i.e., body odors) emitted by horses—a research question examined in an article recently published in Animals. A central issue is that the formulation of the question itself contains the answer to it. In...

To date, odor research has primarily focused on the behavioral effects of common odors on consumer perception and choices. We report a study that examines, for the first time, the effects of human body odor cues on consumer purchase behaviors. The influence of human chemosignals produced in three conditions, namely happiness, fear, a relaxed condit...

In three studies, we advance the research on the association between abstract concepts and spatial dimensions by examining the spatial anchoring of political categories in three different paradigms (spatial placement, memory, and classification) and using non-linguistic stimuli (i.e., photos of politicians). The general hypothesis that politicians...

The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) reflects the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent behavior more abstractly than expectancy-inconsistent. The current studies replicate the LEB in Portuguese and examine it in a second language (English). Earlier studies found differences in processing a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) shapin...

The experiment reported here used a variation of the spatial cueing task to examine the effects of unimodal and bimodal attention-orienting primes on target identification latencies and eye gaze movements. The primes were a nonspatial auditory tone and words known to drive attention consistent with the dominant writing and reading direction, as wel...

This study investigates whether there exist differences in facial emotion detection accuracy in patients suffering from Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) due do their facial paresis. Forty-four VS patients, half of them with and half of them without a facial paresis, had to classify pictures of facial expressions as being emotional or non-emotional. The v...

This research focuses on sex differences in the behavioral patterns of dogs when they are exposed to human chemosignals (sweat) produced in happy and fear contexts. No age, breed or apparatus-directed behavior differences were found. However, when exposed to fear chemosignals, dogs’ behavior towards their owners, and their stress signals lasted lon...

It has been shown that the presence of conspecifics modulates human"s vigilance strategies as is the case with animal species. Mere presence has been found to reduce vigilance. However, animal research has also shown that chemosignals (e.g., sweat) produced during fear-inducing situations modulate individuals' threat detection strategies. In the ca...

It has been shown that the presence of conspecifics modulates human’s vigilance strategies as is the case with animal species. Mere presence has been found to reduce vigilance. However, animal research has also shown that chemosignals (e.g., sweat) produced during fear-inducing situations modulates individuals’ threat detection strategies. In the c...

Building on the notion that processing of emotional stimuli is sensitive to context, in two experimental tasks we explored whether the detection of emotion in emotional words (task 1) and facial expressions (task 2) is facilitated by social verbal context. Three different levels of contextual supporting information were compared, namely (1) no info...

Movement is generally conceived of as unfolding laterally in the writing direction that one is socialized into. In ‘Western’ languages, this is a left-to-right bias contributing to an imbalance in how attention is distributed across space. We propose that the rightward attentional bias exercises an additional unidirectional influence on discriminat...

Universally, female skin color is lighter than male skin color, irrespective of geographical location. This difference is a distinctive and universal adaptive pattern that emerges after puberty. We address whether this sexual dimorphism is cognitively and culturally represented to ground gender. To this end, we examine a non-Western, non-industrial...

People adjust how they talk about someone depending on whether their audience likes or dislikes that person. When they do so, they end up recalling the person more positively or negatively. This is known as the saying-is-believing effect, and it shows how tuning communication to an audience's attitudes and beliefs shapes one's memories. But people...

We examined whether reading and writing habits known to drive agency perception also shape the attribution of other agency-related traits, particularly for faces oriented congruently with script direction (i.e., left-to-right). Participants rated front-oriented, left-oriented and right-oriented faces on 14 dimensions. These ratings were first reduc...

Exposure to body odors (chemosignals) collected under different emotional states (i.e., emotional chemosignals) can modulate our visual system, biasing visual perception. Recent research has suggested that exposure to fear body odors, results in a generalized faster access to visual awareness of different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, h...

A growing body of research has shown that human apocrine sweat carries information about the emotional state of its donor. Exposure to sweat produced in a fear-inducing context, triggers in its receivers a simulacrum of this emotional state, as evidenced by increased medial frontalis and corrugator supercilii (facial electromyography; fEMG) activit...

Objective This study investigates whether there exist differences in lateralization of facial emotion processing in patients suffering from Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) based on the presence of a facial paresis and their degree of facial functioning as measured by the House Brackmann Grading scale (HBG). Methods Forty‐four VS patients, half of them...

Objective(s) The present study aimed to replicate the finding that vestibular schwannoma (VS) patients with facial paresis experience lower health related quality of life (QoL) than those without facial paresis in a Dutch sample, and to extend these findings by measuring VS patients' overall satisfaction with life, social function, and emotion. Me...

Chemical communication is common among animals. In humans, the chemical basis of social communication has remained a black box, despite psychological and neural research showing distinctive physiological, behavioral, and neural consequences of body odors emitted during emotional states like fear and happiness. We used a multidisciplinary approach t...

Human body odors contain chemosignals that make species-specific communication possible. Such communication is without communicative intent and is generally below the threshold of consciousness. Human recipients of these chemosignals produced during emotional conditions display a simulacrum of the emotional state under which the chemosignal was pro...

A considerable volume of animal research on detecting threat and foraging reveals that the co-presence of conspecifics reduces vigilance and enhances foraging. Monitoring threat is an adaptive process and is of considerable relevance to humans. It is therefore important to understand how the presence of others influences threat monitoring - namely...

The two halves of the brain are believed to play different roles in emotional processing. In studies involving chimeric faces, emotional expressions in the left visual field are more strongly perceived as emotional than those in the right visual field. Notably, the role of facial mimicry has not been studied in relation to hemispheric lateralizatio...

In two experiments, we examined the impact of color on cognitive performance by asking participants to categorize stimuli presented in three different colors: red, green, and gray (baseline). Participants were either asked to categorize the meaning of words as related to the concepts of “go” or “stop” (Experiment 1) or to indicate if a neutral verb...

Universally, female skin color is lighter than male skin color, irrespective of geographical location. This difference is a distinctive and universal adaptive pattern that emerges after puberty. We address whether this sexual dimorphism is cognitively and culturally represented to ground gender. To this end, we examine a non-Western, non-industrial...

In five studies (N = 638), we extended the in-out effect to person perception, examining the influence of oral approach-avoidance movements activated by word articulation, on preference, sociability and competence judgments of mock-usernames. Users with inward, in contrast to outward-usernames, were always preferred and judged as warmer. However, t...

Abstract Choosing food is not a trivial decision that people need to make daily, which is often subject to social influences. Here, we studied a human homolog of social transmission of food preference (STFP) as observed in rodents and other animals via chemosignals of body secretions. Human social chemosignals (sweat) produced during a disgust or n...

In a double-blind experiment, participants were exposed to facial images of anger, disgust, fear, and neutral expressions under 2 body odor conditions: fear and neutral sweat. They had to indicate the valence of the gradually emerging facial image. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, namely a “general negative evaluative state” hypothesis and a...

In a double-blind experiment, participants were exposed to facial images of anger, disgust, fear, and neutral expressions under 2 body odor conditions: fear and neutral sweat. They had to indicate the valence of the gradually emerging facial image. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, namely a "general negative evaluative state" hypothesis and a...

Based on research in physical anthropology, we argue that brightness marks the abstract category of gender, with light colours marking the female gender and dark colours marking the male gender. In a set of three experiments, we examine this hypothesis, first in a speeded gender classification experiment with male and female names presented in blac...

We report a study examining interspecies emotion transfer via body odors (chemosignals). Do human body odors (chemosignals) produced under emotional conditions of happiness and fear provide information that is detectable by pet dogs (Labrador and Golden retrievers)? The odor samples were collected from the axilla of male donors not involved in the...

Eye-gaze discrimination is critical for human communication. When seeing a person looking at a particular direction our attention is shifted to the same location. However, literature has suggested that visual attention orienting is susceptible to cultural determinants like the reading and writing direction. For European languages, this is a left-to...

Three experiments were designed to test whether experimentally created ad hoc associative networks evoke false memories. We used the DRM (Deese, Roediger, McDermott) paradigm with lists of ad hoc categories composed of exemplars aggregated toward specific goals (e.g., going for a picnic) that do not share any consistent set of features. Experiment...

Humans use multiple senses to navigate the social world. Among these, our sense of smell is arguably the most underestimated one. One intriguing function of the sense of smell is its social communicative function. Research has shown that human odors can convey information about a range of states (e.g., emotions, sickness) and traits (e.g., individu...

We assessed how highly trained dogs respond to gestural versus verbal signals when their handlers or an unfamiliar person asked them to perform an obedience task. Dogs were requested to perform four different actions (“Sit”, “Down”, “Stay” and “Come”) upon receiving congruent (only gestural or only verbal) or incongruent signals (gestural and verba...

This study examines the negative stereotypes of the category of women and their subcategories through the language of insults. Participants produced a list of epithets induced by the same hypothetical scenario in which the protagonist was presented either as a “prostitute” or as a “girl” (i.e., nonprostitute). Findings showed that the prostitute wa...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1973.

Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS), 37th Annual Meeting, Bonita Springs, Florida, 22–25 April 2015

It is well known that feelings of happiness transfer between individuals through mimicry induced by vision and hearing. The evidence is inconclusive, however, as to whether happiness can be communicated through the sense of smell via chemosignals. As chemosignals are a known medium for transferring negative emotions from a sender to a receiver, we...

Sniffing our hand after a handshake may allow us to detect chemical signals produced by others.

Humans can register another person's fear not only with their eyes and ears, but also with their nose. Previous research has demonstrated that exposure to body odors from fearful individuals elicited implicit fear in others. The odor of fearful individuals appears to have a distinctive signature that can be produced relatively rapidly, driven by a...

Interpersonal synchrony is characterized by a temporary alignment of periodic behaviors with another person. This process requires that at least one of the two individuals monitors and adjusts their movements to maintain alignment with the other individual (the referent). Interestingly, recent research on interpersonal synchrony has found that peop...

Person memory has been mainly investigated as an individual process. In contrast, we argue that person memory results from the interplay between the individual and the context. Thus, the way people acquire and retrieve social information is constrained by the context in which these processes take place. This argument was explored in three experimen...

Recent evidence suggests that humans can become fearful after exposure to olfactory fear signals, yet these studies have reported the effects of fear chemosignals without examining emotion-relevant input from traditional communication modalities (i.e., vision, audition). The question that we pursued here was therefore: How significant is an olfacto...

Two studies examine the grounding of gender by the alignment of the female-male with the bipolar dimension of light-dark (most likely due to sexual dimorphism in skin pigmentation). We hypothesized and showed that in a speeded classification task males names are processed faster when they are presented in a black typeface (Exp. 1) or a dark color (...

Recent research has examined the role of accounting narratives on investors' judgments and decisions. This study extends this line of inquiry by examining the effects of language categories on investors' judgments and decisions-the notion that narratives written with different predicates (verbs versus adjectives/nouns) will have a differential effe...

Previous research has documented sex differences in nonverbal communication. What has remained unknown is whether similar sex differences would exist with regard to olfactory communication via chemosignals, a relatively neglected nonverbal communication medium. Because women generally have a better sense of smell and greater sensitivity to emotiona...

This study reports an examination of the internal clock model, according to which subjective time duration is influenced by attention and arousal state. In a time production task, we examine the hypothesis that an arousing odor and an upright body posture affect perceived duration. The experimental task was performed while participants were exposed...

Communication is the foundation of sociality and is made possible by a diverse set of media. Research on human communication has primarily focused on auditory and visual modalities. Here, we discuss the role of the olfactory modality as an important medium of human communication and highlight the significance of interpersonal chemosignaling in the...

Previous research suggests that action language is comprehended by activating the motor system. We report a study, investigating a critical question in this research field: do negative sentences activate the motor system? Participants were exposed to sentences in the affirmation and negation forms while the zygomatic muscle activity on the left sid...

The current research examined the impact of temperature cues on perspective-taking. Individuals often start with their own point-of-view when taking another's perspective and thereby unintentionally project their own perspective onto others, which ultimately leads to egocentrically biased inferences of others' perspectives. Accordingly, perspective...

We examine and find support for the hypothesis that time-referent hand-arm movements influence temporal judgments. In line with the concept of "left is associated with earlier times, and right is associated with later times," we show that performing left (right) hand-arm movements while thinking about a past event increases (decreases) the perceive...

Three studies are reported examining the grounding of abstract concepts across two modalities (visual and auditory) and their symbolic representation. A comparison of the outcomes across these studies reveals that the symbolic representation of political concepts and their visual and auditory modalities is convergent. In other words, the spatial re...

In 2004, we (Smith & Semin, 2004) described a conceptual framework of "socially situated cognition," encompassing four major themes. Cognition is for adaptive action, involves the body and sensori-motor systems, is situated in immediate intercourse with the environment, and is distributed across other minds and tools. Here, we introduce two broader...

In three studies, we have examined construal level in a social context: How an event is construed by both the sender and the receiver in a conversation. We tested the influence of two critical cues on construal level: Temporal distance to the event date and the receiver’s existing knowledge about the event. Results showed that while construal level...

Recent work suggests that people evaluate target stimuli within short and flexible time periods called evaluation windows. Stimuli that briefly precede a target (forward primes) or briefly succeed a target (backward primes) are often included in the target's evaluation. In this article, the authors propose that predictable forward primes act as "go...

Results of the analyses of the Error Rates for Experiment 1 and 2. (RTF)

Experiment 2 : Replication of Shifting Evaluation Window effect for Blockwise Condition for participants, who received this condition first. (RTF)

Additional Analysis: The Moderating Role of Congruency between Go Signal Prime and Target [cf. 3] for Experiment 1 and 2. (RTF)

To navigate a dynamically changing social environment, we respond to the situated demands made upon us by flexibly adapting to these demands. At the same time, we actively structure our physical and social environment to reduce its complexity and release cognitive resources. This is achieved, in part, by making use of the knowledge and competencies...

Can humans communicate emotional states via chemical signals? In the experiment reported here, we addressed this question by examining the function of chemosignals in a framework furnished by embodied social communication theory. Following this theory, we hypothesized that the processes a sender experiences during distinctive emotional states are t...

Motor resonance processes are involved both in language comprehension and in affect perception. Therefore we predict that listeners understand spoken affective words slower, if the phonetic form of a word is incongruent with its affective meaning. A language comprehension study involving an interference paradigm confirmed this prediction. This inte...

In two experiments we show that the experience of processing fluency can be grounded in the motor system. We manipulated whether responses in a stimulus-response paradigm were congruent or incongruent with the orientation of graspable objects. Besides the typical affordance effect (Tucker & Ellis, 1998), namely a reaction time advantage for respons...

Emotion events are undoubtedly socially constructed and emerge in interactions that take place in relationships; they are dynamic and situated in social-cultural contexts as Boiger and Mesquita (2012) argue. However, such constructions evolve within important limiting conditions set to human functioning. Our understanding of how emotional events ar...

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that a comprehensive understanding of language, cognitive and affective processes, and social and interpersonal phenomena cannot be achieved without understanding the ways these processes are grounded in bodily states. The term 'embodiment' captures the common denominator of these developments,...

We hypothesize that while evaluative priming involves proprioceptive cues, the IAT is representational due to its structural features and the specific algorithm upon which the IAT-effect rests. As predicted, evaluative priming is shown to rely on differential facial muscle activity while the IAT as a measurement instrument is not influenced by prop...

In this chapter, we present human cognitive processes as situated and dynamic, a perspective identified by the umbrella term ‘situated cognition’, or ’socially situated cognition’ (SSC). We argue that while the SSC approach does not present a theoretically unified framework, it constitutes an approach offering a set of general principles and emphas...