America
Handshake can find if she is made for you
London, March 3
Do you know that the handshake
-- limp or firm -- can sniff people out? According to a fascinating
study, people use the touch of a handshake to sample and sniff chemical
signals that could explain why the greeting evolved in the first place.
"Your
handshake conveys subliminal social cues," said professor Noam Sobel,
chair of neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
It
is well known that we emit odours that influence the behaviour and
perception of others but unlike other mammals "we do not sample those
odours from each other overtly," the findings showed.
In the study, scientists found that people use the touch of a handshake to sample and sniff signalling molecules.
During the experiment, nearly 280 people were greeted either with or without a handshake.
They were filmed using hidden cameras and observed to see how many times they touched their face.
One finding was that people constantly sniff their own hands -- keeping a hand at their nose about 22 percent of the time.
Subjects greeted with a handshake significantly increased touching of their faces with their right hand.
However, this only seemed to be the case when the subject had been greeted by a person of the same gender.
"Our experiments reveal handshakes as a discreet way to actively search for social chemosignals," Sobel noted.
Previous
studies have suggested that human chemosignals play a role in mate
selection, conveying fear, altering brain activity and synchronising
women's menstrual cycles.
Handshaking is already known to convey a
range of information depending on the duration of the gesture, its
strength and the posture used.
"We argue that it may have evolved
to serve as one of a number of ways to sample social chemicals from
each other, and that it still serves this purpose in a meaningful albeit
subliminal way," the authors concluded.
The study was published in the journal eLife.