Getting to know someone usually requires at least a little conversation. But a new study suggests you can get a hint of an individual's personality through his or her scent alone. 
 
 Participants in the study assessed, with some degree of accuracy, how outgoing, anxious or dominant people were after only taking a whiff of their clothes. The study is the first to test whether personality traits can be discerned through body odor. 
 
 While the match-up between responses by the judges and the judged were not perfect, they do suggest that, when forming a first impression, we take into account a person's smell, as well as visual and audible cues to their personality traits, the researchers said. 
 
 We not only express ourselves through our looks, "we also express ourselves with how we smell," said study researcher Agnieszka Sorokowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland. 
 
 The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Personality. 
 
 Personality smells 
 
 Sorokowska and colleagues asked 30 men and 30 women to don white cotton t-shirts for three consecutive nights. Participants could not use fragrances, deodorants or soaps, and could not smoke or drink or eat odorous foods during the study. Participants also took a personality test. 
 
 Shirts from the "odor donors" were collected and rated by 100 men and 100 women. Raters were asked to smell the shirts (placed in non-transparent plastic bags) and evaluate five personality traits of the donors, on a scale of one to 10. Each rater assessed six shirts, and each shirt was assessed by 20 raters. 
 
 The judges' ratings matched up with the self-assessments of the donors for three personality traits: extroversion (the tendency to be outgoing and sociable) neuroticism (the tendency to feel anxious and moody) and dominance (the urge to be a leader). 
 
 The matches were far from perfect. But the raters predicted the donor's level of extroversion and neuroticism through smell about as accurately as participants in a different study predicted personality traits based on a video depicting a person's behavior, Sorokowska said. 
 
 Judgments of dominance were most accurate in the case where an individual rater was assessing the odor of someone who was the opposite sex, suggesting such judgments are especially important when it comes to choosing a mate, the researchers said. 
 
 Odor and emotions 
 
 Extroversion, neuroticism and dominance are all traits that may, to some extent, be expressed physiologically, including through our emotions. 
 
 For instance, people who are neurotic may sweat more when they experience stress, which would modify the bacteria in their underarms and make them smell different, the researchers said. 
 
 Personality traits may also be linked with the secretion of hormones that could alter a persons' scent. People who are high in dominance may have higher levels of testosterone, which in turn may modify their sweat glands, the researchers said. 
 
 The findings are preliminary and more studies need to be done to confirm the results, Sorokowska said. It's not clear whether the same link would be found in other cultures known to have weaker body odors, Sorokowska said. 
 
 Pass it on: Some traits of an individual's personality can be assessed through smell, preliminary research suggests. 
 
 Follow MyHealthNewsDaily staff writer Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner. Find us on Facebook. ||||| Certain personalities have a smell: study European study says scent can reveal details about personality 
 
 This puts a new spin on the old saw about passing the smell test. 
 
 According to an upcoming study published in the European Journal of Personality, people can make accurate judgments about another person's personality based on the way he or she smells. 
 
 The results of the study were reported by the website MyHealthNewsDaily. 
 
 In the study, Polish researches asked raters to sniff white-cotton T-shirts that were worn for three consecutive nights by 100 men and 100 women who had taken personality tests. 
 
 The raters were then asked to make judgments about the shirt-wearer's personality based on what they smelled. 
 
 Though the sniffers didn't nail it every time, they were able to predict whether the shirt donors were outgoing and extroverted or neurotic and anxious about as accurately as other raters who predicted personality traits after watching a video, researcher Agnieszka Sorokowska told MyHeathNewsDaily. 
 
 Researchers said the sniff-testers were particularly accurate when detecting dominance in a member of the opposite sex, suggesting that men and woman are using more than their eyes and ears when choosing a potential mate. 
 
 The researchers were planning more studies to confirm the results, the website said. ||||| Photo: Nat Fein/Getty Images 
 
 At any given moment, an estimated 108 million people in the United States are on a diet. But despite the fact that the U.S. weight-loss industry makes roughly $20 billion in revenue each year, people continue to fail for one reason or another. Part of the problem, new research suggests, is that our eating habits are influenced by deep-seated personality traits. Your neuroticism, in other words, could be partially responsible for your love of chocolate and cheese. 
 
 For the study, published in the journal Appetite, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology sent three questionnaires — one on personality, one on eating habits, and one on food choices — to a random sample of addresses. After excluding subjects who skipped more than 10 percent of the questions, data from nearly a thousand participants (with an average age of 55 years old) was analyzed. 
 
 The personality questions were designed to measure what psychologists believe are the five basic dimensions of personality — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The researchers were curious whether, and to what extent, high or low scores on these different traits would correlate with certain eating habits. 
 
 “We found that a person’s personality does, in fact, determine why he or she eats and what he or she eats,” said Carmen Keller, the study’s lead author. For one thing, “A lack of conscientiousness leads people to eat impulsively and to lose self-control in the face of tempting food situations with palatable and nicely smelling and tasting food,” she explained. In addition, “Neurotic people may eat too much high-caloric food to deal with their negative emotions.” 
 
 Extroversion, which, unlike neuroticism or a lack of conscientiousness tends to have mostly positive connotations in society, was also linked to potentially unhealthy eating habits. “A surprising result is that extroverted people eat more due to external reasons — such as a nice smell or the taste of food — and, in turn, they often consume more meat, sweet foods, savory foods, and sugar-sweetened drinks,” explained Keller. “It might be that the higher sociability of extroverted people results in having more meals with other people and, therefore, eating foods that are not healthy.” Indeed, a lot of past research has suggested that social components greatly influence both what people eat and how frequently they exercise, including studies showing that people-pleasers eat more, women mimic each other’s eating behaviors, and finding a walking group can help you become healthier. 
 
 Taken together, the results reported by Keller and her team suggest that certain personality characteristics can be seen as “risk factors” for an unhealthy lifestyle. “These findings add to a growing body of evidence showing the importance of the personality traits of neuroticism and conscientiousness for a variety of health-related behaviors, including a healthy diet,” said Tim Bogg, an assistant professor of psychology at Wayne State University, who has studied conscientiousness and health, but who wasn’t involved in this study. “The results show that part of the complicated puzzle of maintaining a healthy diet over the long term is related to our general tendencies for emotion regulation and self-control, not simply how good we are at counting calories or avoiding trans fats.” 
 
 In other words, there could be an underrated “know thyself” aspect to successful weight management — understanding how you respond to a stressful day at work, say, or to attending a party where there’s likely to be a lot of food. As Fiona Johnson, a research associate at University College London who also wasn’t affiliated with this study explained, since personality traits are “largely stable over the life course,” understanding the connection between them and eating habits could offer important new opportunities for people to better monitor and control their eating habits. “Overcoming these fundamental tendencies can be very difficult, and identifying ways in which people can boost their capacity to control their eating (eating self-regulation) is the next big challenge in eating research.” 
 
 There are limitations to this study — for example, it only sampled Swiss subjects, and did so with self-reported inventories — but it certainly adds some evidence to the common-sense notion that our personalities, which greatly influence how we react to just about everything, also affect what — and how much — to eat. So while there’s more research to be done, those trying to lose weight might want to look into not just calorie-counting apps and healthier foods at the supermarket, but personality inventories, too.
– You are what you reek? It turns out that we can tell a lot about someone's personality just by their smell, according to the New York Daily News. Sixty people in Poland wore the same T-shirt for three nights, and did not use soap, smoke, drink, or "eat odorous foods" during the study. Those shirts were then sniffed by 200 lucky volunteers, who were asked to judge the smells based on five personality traits, such as extroversion, neuroticism, and dominance. The results weren't perfect, but the smellers' predictions about extroversion and neuroticism were about as accurate as those of raters who made their judgments after watching a video. MyHealthNewsDaily notes that the smell-testers did especially well in detecting dominance in members of the opposite sex.