Couples who have close relationship can detect each other’s emotions by smell. Researchers claim that lovers can actually spot each other’s feelings of fear, happiness and sexual arousal, writes Geniusbeauty.

Denise Chen, a psychologist from the Rice University, said that couples with close relationship are more likely to instinctively understand each other’s feelings.

Chen and her colleagues studied 20 heterosexual couples who had been living together for between 1 and 7 years. The participants were shown videos designed to induce feeling of fear, joy and sexual arousal. They wore pads on their arms to collect sweat.

Then the volunteers were asked to smell four jars containing the sweat from their partner or a stranger of the opposite sex and recognize the feelings experienced by a person. Nearly two-thirds could detect emotions when they sniffed a partner’s odor. Couples who lived together for the longest period of time were better at indentifying the specific emotion. The smell accuracy rate for strangers was at 50 per cent.