The Smell of Fear

We know that plants and animals communicate via smell, but if and how humans communicate non-verbally via small molecules in the air, remains enigmatic. Can we “smell” the feelings of another person nearby? Our project will discover relationships between emotional stimuli and molecules exhaled by humans, through novel experiments, and through developing a new and broadly applicable data mining approach to analyse the resultant data.

The human body continuously emits a vast number of molecules into the air known as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). While experiments have been performed to characterise VOC emissions as a function of age, gender, diet, and exercise, little attention has been paid to whether breath reflect a person’s current emotional state. Our investigation is a completely new direction of research; combining our team’s skills in atmospheric chemistry, breath analysis, emotional response analysis, and data mining. It is based on our preliminary findings in regard to regular patterns of VOC emissions in movie theatres. This work has high potential impact in research communities including medicine, psychology, and biology and their further applications of the new knowledge.

2023

Wicker, Jörg; Krauter, Nicolas; Derstorff, Bettina; Stönner, Christof; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Williams, Jonathan; Kramer, Stefan

Cinema Experiments 2013 Miscellaneous

2023.

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Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Wicker, Jörg; Williams, Jonathan

Cinema Experiments 2015 Miscellaneous

2023.

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2019

Williams, Jonathan; Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Krauter, Nicolas; Wicker, Jörg; Kramer, Stefan

What can we learn from the air chemistry of crowds? Proceedings Article

In: Hansel, Armin; Dunkl, Jürgen (Ed.): 8th International Conference on Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry and its Applications, pp. 121-123, Innsbruck University Press, Innsbruck, 2019.

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2018

Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Wicker, Jörg; Williams, Jonathan

Proof of concept study: Testing human volatile organic compounds as tools for age classification of films Journal Article

In: PLOS One, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 1-14, 2018.

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Stönner, Christof; Edtbauer, Achim; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Wicker, Jörg; Williams, Jonathan

Investigating human emissions of volatile organic compounds in a cinema, flux rates, links to scene content, and possible applications Proceedings Article

In: 15th Conference of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, INDOOR AIR 2018, International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, 2018, ISBN: 978-171382651-4.

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2016

Williams, Jonathan; Stönner, Christof; Wicker, Jörg; Krauter, Nicolas; Derstorff, Bettina; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Kramer, Stefan

Cinema audiences reproducibly vary the chemical composition of air during films, by broadcasting scene specific emissions on breath Journal Article

In: Scientific Reports, vol. 6, 2016.

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2015

Wicker, Jörg; Krauter, Nicolas; Derstorff, Bettina; Stönner, Christof; Bourtsoukidis, Efstratios; Klüpfel, Thomas; Williams, Jonathan; Kramer, Stefan

Cinema Data Mining: The Smell of Fear Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 1235-1304, ACM ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-4503-3664-2.

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