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Can close romantic partners unknowingly smell each other's emotions? Does love stink? According to ScienceNews, romantically linked partners could detect each other's feelings of fear, happiness and sexual arousal nearly two-thirds of the time.

"Familiarity with a partner enhances detection of emotional cues in that person's smell," said Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston.


The test may strike some as odd. Underarm pads collected sweat from participants as they watched videos that induced self-reported happiness, fear, sexual arousal or neutral feelings.

When the participants that were in a relationship lived together did the sniff test "nearly two-thirds of the time, participants could pick up the specific emotions from their partner's body odor."

Accuracy fell to about 50 percent for opposite-sex strangers.

More on the test from ScienceNews.