MILITARY STUDYING HOW TO MAKE FEAR CONTAGIOUS

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DANGER ROOM - American military researchers are working to uncover and
harness the most terrifying chemical imaginable: that most primal odor,
the scent of fear. Scream Pheromones are chemicals released by animals
as signals to their own kind: for sex, for territorial marking, and
more. They're often detected in the olfactory membranes. But there's
more to pheromones than attraction. Many animals have an alarm pheromone
which is used to signal danger; aphids, for example, use it to cause
their fellow lice to flee. 

Now, the US Army is trying to track down and harness people's smell of
fear.  The military has backed a study on the "Identification and
Isolation of Human Alarm Pheromones," which "focused on the Preliminary
Identification of Steroids of Interest in Human Fear Sweat." The
so-called "skydiving protocol" was the researchers' method of choice.

The authors collected sweat, urine, blood, saliva, ECG, respiration, and
self-report measures in 20 subjects before, during, and immediately
following their first-time tandem skydive, as well as before, during,
and immediately following their running on a treadmill for the same
period of time. . . In a lecture given at a 2007 Congress on Stress, the
researchers hint at what their study found:
"Our findings indicate that there may be a hidden biological component
to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally,
'contagious.'"

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/pentagon-resear.html

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