I am delighted to announce that this week's BERG seminar (Wednesday, May 10th at 4pm, hybrid), will be Dr Arnaud Tognetti from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He will be discussing
the identification of sickness. The abstract and link are below. Please join us, either in the Psychology common room or online!
Identification of sickness: some past, current and future projects
Humankind is an inherently social species. Although social life brings clear benefits, sociality also facilitates transmission of infectious pathogens. Many social species, including
mandrills, mice, and lobsters identify sick conspecifics via olfactory and visual cues and strategically avoid physical contact with them. Humans are likewise able to identify sick individuals based on visual cues of sickness, such as vomiting, coughing, sneezing
or rashes, and the perception of these cues induces strong emotional disgust and subsequent avoidance. However, these sickness cues are expressed when people are already at an advanced disease stage and, often, have been contagious for a while. The ability
to detect and avoid sick individuals in the early stages of infection would be even more efficient in reducing the likelihood of contamination. In this talk, I will present an overview of my recent work that suggests that sickness can be identified based on
different sensory sickness cues (e.g., facial, olfactory, vocal) only a couple hours after an experimentally induced systemic inflammation.