Maternal Scent Improves Social Bonds of Children With Strangers Even When Mothers Are Away, Research Suggests

A new study conducted by the Center for Development Social Neuroscience suggests that bodily scents of mothers could help their offsprings get familiar and bond with distinct individuals. These bonds could be induced by certain chemical compositions in moms' body odor, which could help the children define the personality and characteristics of other people. The scent relayed to the kids could also stay for a long time through specific signals that remain active in children even when the mother is away from them.

Maternal Odors and Social Capability of Offsprings

(Photo : Ron Lach from Pexels)

According to a recent investigation, the maternal bodies are found with an interesting feature involving scent. The specified body odor was theorized to have a correlation with a strong bonding capacity that could benefit the mother's children on bonding with other, unfamiliar people. Daily Mail reported that the scent-induced process on parent-to-children could work the same way with the children connecting to strangers.

According to the study's findings, the specific scents serve as a link to keep a natural bond between parents and kids, even if the mothers are absent from the scene. The kid's neurological system utilizes these links to thrive and develop social skills that would later teach them to survive on their own, even without the support from their biological mother.

Maternal odors have promising advantages that could assist human offspring in developing their social capabilities and recognition. However, the puzzle behind the social bonding aspect with brain organ maturation remains unsolved.

The Center for Development Social Neuroscience recently organized a study that would help us understand what matters between the social functions in the brain of kids and the factor that produces the odor from mothers. The study was made possible through the help of 62 mothers. The participants were required to sleep on two nights consecutively while wearing the same cotton-based shirts. After this initial process, data were recorded between the neurological reactions of their children.

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Neural Synchrony of Kids When Exposed to Maternal Scent as High as Face to Face Mother-to-Offspring Interaction

The examination on female parents and their kids included specialized devices with electrodes. The machine was then placed on their heads for the experts to read the information collected through brainwaves. The data from the mothers and their kids were then compared to each other. Based on the findings, the neural synchrony between mothers and offspring increases under a face-to-face interaction.

To see how the neural activity differs when the infants were exposed to strangers, the groupings were shuffled, setting 51 of the kids on seats facing unfamiliar strangers. These strangers were carefully selected: people who had children near the subject's age, lived on a nearby location, and with physical resemblance and age close to their mothers.

The neural synchrony between the offsprings and the stranger were lower compared to the readings with their mothers, but when the children were exposed to the scent-induced shirt, the data appeared comparable to the mother-to-children interaction. Further research will be presented to accomplish contributing analysis on the maternal body odors and the social bonds of kids. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports titled "The molecular basis of thioalcohol production in human body odour."