Olfactory dysfunction in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders: A comprehensive and updated meta-analysis.

Olfaction plays a key role in our daily life, influencing food enjoyment, threat detection, mood and social relationships. Numerous studies have provided evidence of abnormal olfactory function in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. This pre-registered meta-analysis was conducted to (a) provide an updated overview of olfactory function in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, and (b) examine the modulatory effects of demographic and clinical variables on distinct olfactory abilities.

Sniffing out a solution: How emotional body odors can improve mindfulness therapy for social anxiety.

Background: Human body odors (BOs) serve as an effective means of social communication, with individuals exposed to emotional BOs experiencing a partial replication of the sender's affective state. This phenomenon may be particularly relevant in conditions where social interactions are impaired, such as social anxiety. Our study aimed to investigate if emotional human BOs could augment the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions.

Emotion perception through the nose: how olfactory emotional cues modulate the perception of neutral facial expressions in affective disorders.

Humans can decode emotional states from the body odors of the conspecifics and this type of emotional communication is particularly relevant in conditions in which social interactions are impaired, as in depression and social anxiety. The present study aimed to explore how body odors collected in happiness and fearful conditions modulate the subjective ratings, the psychophysiological response and the neural processing of neutral faces in individuals with depressive symptoms, social anxiety symptoms, and healthy controls (N = 22 per group). To this aim, electrocardiogram (ECG) and HD-EEG were recorded continuously.

Combining electrodermal activity analysis and dynamic causal modeling to investigate the visual-odor multimodal integration during face perception.

. This study presents a novel methodological approach for incorporating information related to the peripheral sympathetic response into the investigation of neural dynamics. Particularly, we explore how hedonic contextual olfactory stimuli influence the processing of neutral faces in terms of sympathetic response, event-related potentials and effective connectivity analysis.