Sharing a desk or spending time with someone who smells is usually best avoided, yet it could make you more compassionate.

Research has found that bad body odour is commonly associated with vulnerability, which triggers feelings of concern in others.

This means people tend to increase their level of co-operation when dealing with someone who smells bad because they feel sorry for them.

Lead author Jeroen Camps and colleagues, from the university KU Leuven in Belgium, said: ‘Scents are omnipresent in our daily world and they are of great importance as represented by the use of perfumes or fragrances in the work environment.’
‘Even though it has been argued that bad scents invoke negative judgments, we argued and demonstrated that a bad body odour elicits feelings of pity in others and increases prosocial behaviour.’

This can include underarm sweat, smelly feet, bad breath or other foul-smelling odours.

The research, published online in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, involved several experiments.

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