What Your Nose Has to Say About Your Psychopathy

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Doctors finding it hard to "sniff" out what's going on in your brain? Well it turns out that a new study suggests that your poor sense of smell may be a sign of developing psychopathic traits.

Researchers from Macquarie University in Australia recently published their results of a study in the journal Chemosensory Perception, wherein testing 79 non-criminal adults from their surrounding community the researchers were able to show an inherent link between depreciated olfactory sensing and an increased tendency towards psychopathic behavior. The researchers indicated that the impaired sense of smell may point to inefficient processing in the frontal cortex of the brain, which also mediates behavioral traits associated with psychopathy.

Looking to see exactly how the frontal cortex impairments affected impulse control and adherence to social mores, the group measured levels of psychopathy looking at five major areas: callousness, criminal tendencies, manipulation, erratic lifestyles, and empathy with others.

Overall, after assessing the 79 patients, the researchers found that those who scored highly on the psychopathic traits test were much more likely to struggle with their sense of smell and were not even able to distinguish between two largely different scents when prompted. Though further research in  the field must be investigated, to determine whether other frontal cortex behaviors also show a correlation to psychopathy and the sense of smell, the results of the study conclusively found that psychopaths also had less efficient processing in the regions of the brain known to control their sense of smell.

"Our findings provide support for the premise that deficits in the front part of the brain may be a characteristic of non-criminal psychopaths" co-authors Mehmet Mahmut and Richard Stevenson say. "Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits because performance expectancies are unclear in odor tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake good or bad responses."

So although psychopaths may be cunning and devious enough to construct elegantly horrific events, their plans may be thwarted when they're asked to stop and smell the roses around them.