Hannibal Lecter may have enjoyed a glass of chianti with human liver but he is unlikely to have appreciated the wine’s bouquet.

People who scored highly on psychopathic traits tended to struggle both to identify smells and tell the difference between them

Psychopaths can be recognised by their poor sense of smell, scientists have discovered.

The reason is that smell is processed by the front part of the brain.

Impaired function in this region has also been linked to psychopathic traits such as callousness, manipulation, sensation seeking and anti-social behaviour.

The forebrain is largely responsible for planning, impulse control and behaving in accordance with social norms.

Scientists studied 79 non-criminal adults, assessing their sense of smell and also measuring levels of psychopathy.

They found that people who scored highly on psychopathic traits tended to struggle both to identify smells and tell the difference between them.

Writing in the journal Chemosensory Perception, authors Mehmet Mahmut and Richard Stevenson, from Macquarie University in Australia, wrote: “Our findings provide support for the premise that deficits in the front part of the brain may be a characteristic of non-criminal psychopaths.

“Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits, because performance expectancies are unclear in odour tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake good or bad responses.”

Not all psychopaths are serial killers like Hannibal Lecter, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 movie The Silence of the Lambs.

In one scene in the film, Dr Lecter recalls eating the liver of one of his victims “with some fava beans and a nice chianti”.