Most men and women snuggle the clothes of far-away loved one

Whenever her boyfriend goes out of town, Peggy
Loper makes sure he leaves one of his worn — but unwashed — T-shirts
behind. At night, as she snuggles with the shirt, Loper is comforted
and transported. “I put it over the pillow so it’s next to my face,”
says the 48-year-old law-school student from Salem, N.J. “It’s like
having my head on his chest.”
Loper
is not alone in her use of scent to evoke vivid memories of a loved
one. As many as three-quarters of women say they snuggle with shirts
and other clothing worn by someone dear, but not near, researchers
reported in a study published in the December issue of the Journal of
Applied Social Psychology. Even more striking was the data on men: A
full two-thirds of men admitted to cuddling with clothing.
To
learn more about how ordinary people used body scents to evoke
memories, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh rounded up 121
night school students. The students were asked several questions,
including whether they’d ever intentionally smelled another person’s
clothing to remember or feel closer to him or her, whether they’d ever
slept with (or in) another person’s clothing because it smelled like
him or her and whether they’d ever given an article of unlaundered
clothing to a loved one because it smelled like them.
Although the students mostly reported smelling
or sleeping with the clothing of a romantic partner, some said they had
also gotten comfort from smelling the clothing of a child or other close relative.


The scent of love

The
findings seem to run counter to what you’d expect from a culture
inundated with products designed to obliterate personal scents, from
deodorant to mouthwash. Even the researchers were surprised to see how
many people use smell to conjure up a loved one’s memory.
“It’s
the kind of thing that never really comes up in normal conversation,”
says the study’s lead author, Melanie Shoup, now a doctoral student at
the State University of New York at Albany. “But when I was going
through high school and college, I would wear a boyfriend’s shirt to
bed when I was separated from him. And when I asked my friends, they
said they had done similar things.”
Some
of the study subjects provided specifics, such as a father who smelled
his baby daughter’s clothes to feel close to her and a woman whose
boyfriend sent unlaundered shirts back from Iraq in plastic bags to
preserve his scent.
Students
also talked about memories evoked by a dead person’s belongings. People
would say that as they were going through a relative’s clothing, the
scent on the clothes would suddenly hit them. “It was almost like a
presence,” Schoup says.
Scientists
who study the influence of chemicals that can be detected by the nose —
some of these substances have an effect, but no obvious smell — aren’t
surprised by the study’s results. Part of the explanation might be that
scent has a direct line to our memory centers.
“The
part of the brain that processes odor flows right into the part of the
brain that is involved in emotion and memory,” says Martha McClintock,
a University of Chicago psychologist.



The nose always knows

McClintock’s
been hot on the scent of scent since she discovered the hormone —
detected by the nose — that causes women to synchronize menstrual
cycles. More recent studies have shown that women prefer the scents of
men who were more ethnically close.
“One
of the things we may be picking up is kin recognition through smell,”
says McClintock. “People find the scent of kin more pleasant than
non-kin.”
That
may explain why some people in the new study were comforted by the
scent of clothing from close relatives, McClintock adds.
Smells
can be more evocative than visual or auditory signals, experts say. And
that may be because the olfactory bulb and the limbic system, the brain
region responsible for processing emotions, are among the most ancient
parts of the brain, says Philip R. Muskin, a professor of clinical
psychiatry at Columbia University.
The physical proximity of these brain regions
might add some immediacy to the link between a scent and the emotion it
evokes. “Scents really pull us in, in a way that may not be consciously
apparent,” Muskin says. “We detect a scent and immediately feel
something.”
Just
think how quickly a certain scent can bring back memories of an old
boyfriend or girlfriend, he adds. And these memories can be quite
powerful, Muskin says.
“I had an aunt who wore very heavy perfume,” he adds. “When she passed away, her sister gave us one of her jewlery cases. Whenever you open it, the scent of her perfume just rushes out. And for an instant, it’s like she’s there.”