Why sweating in sync with your date could mean love

FIRST dates can be a minefield. You must decide what to wear, where to go and how to act with a potential love interest.

And for years it’s been thought that things are going well if you mirror each other’s body language.

Scientists, however, have found that matching smiles, eye gaze and laughter might not necessarily signify attraction.

Instead the less appealing action of sweating in sync is a much more precise indicator of how much someone likes you. Researchers measured the physical dynamics between 71 couples during reallife blind dates.

The participants wore glasses which could track their eye movements and devices to measure physiological signals including heart rate and how much they were sweating. They were also asked to rate how attractive their dates were.

Results from the Dutch study at Leiden University reveal the more participants were attracted to each other, the more their heart and sweat rate synchronised.

Even if the dates smiled and mimicked each other’s gestures, this was not linked to how much they liked one another. In the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers said having matching sweating and heart rates could indicate a ‘genuine emotional exchange’ as it requires both people’s nervous systems to become simultaneously activated.

‘During these moments a joint mental state potentially facilitates the feeling of a “click” and attraction,’ they added.