Basic emotions elicited by odors and pictures.

Abstract

The sense of olfaction is often reported to have a special relationship with emotional processing. Memories triggered by olfactory cues often have a very emotional load. On the other hand, basic negative or positive emotional states should be sufficient to cover the most significant functions of the olfactory system including ingestion, hazard avoidance, and social communication. Thus, we investigated whether different basic emotions can be evoked in healthy people through the sense of olfaction. We asked 119 participants which odor evokes one of the six basic emotions (happiness, disgust, anger, anxiety, sadness, and surprise); another 97 participants were asked about pictures evoking those emotions. The results showed that almost every participant could name an olfactory elicitor for happiness or disgust. Olfactory elicitors of anxiety were reported less frequently, but they were still reported by three-quarters of the participants. However, for sadness and anger only about half of the participants reported an olfactory elicitor, whereas significantly more named a visual cue. Olfactory emotion elicitors were mainly related to the classes of culture, plants, and food, and visual emotion elicitors were largely related to humans. This data supports the hypothesis that in the vast majority of people, few differentiated emotions can be elicited through the olfactory channel. These emotions are happiness, disgust, and anxiety.

Aversive smell associations shape social judgment

“…As for the liking and morality judgments, previous research have shown that these could be influenced by aversive odors (Alaoui-Ismaili, Robin, Rada, Dittmar, & Vernet-Maury, 1997;Croy, Olgun, & Joraschky, 2011;Herz, Schankler, & Beland, 2004;Kirk-Smith, Van Toller, & Dodd, 1983;Reicher, Templeton, Neville, Ferrari, & Drury, 2016;Rozin & Fallon, 1987;Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008;Stevenson, 2010;Yeshurun & Sobel, 2010), but whether odor evaluative conditioning would similarly shape morality and liking judgments is unclear.…”

Consumer Evaluation of Low Sodium Mozzarella Cheese and Development of a Novel Method for Evaluating Emotions

“…Although a variety of different emotion testing methods have been developed, few appear to have been critically tested as a validation process and are oftentimes hybrids of other methods. This review will investigate emotion testing methods from , Thomson et al (2010), Desmet et al (2000), and Croy et al (2011) as these are unique, published, and relatively recent methods.…”

“…The sense of smell has long been associated with eliciting emotions (Croy et al, 2011) and as explored earlier olfaction and emotion processes occur in similar regions of the brain, including the OFC (Rolls & Grabenhorst, 2008), thus Croy et al, (2011) was interested in the elicitation of emotions by odors and pictures. Participants were asked to list odors which they thought would elicit specified emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, and surprise.…”

“…Participants were asked to list odors which they thought would elicit specified emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, anxiety, and surprise. A control group was asked to provide images which they thought would elicit the same emotions; the researchers hypothesized that it would be easier for participants to find visual cues which evoked different emotions compared to odors (Croy et al, 2011). Common groups for evoking happiness in the odor group were: plants (58%) and food (26%), and for disgust: death and waste (55%) and culture products (15%).…”

“…Due to the promising future of emotions in sensory evaluation, a variety of different emotion testing methods have been developed (i.e. Croy et al, 2011;Thomson et al, 2010;Seo et al, 2009;Gard & Kring, 2007); these emotion tests seek to accurately capture the consumer's emotional relationship with food and purchasing intent. Several current emotion testing methods are well thought out and privy to the psychology of emotions; however, in order to critically evaluate these methods in this review, decision making, reward mechanisms, specific stimuli, and emotional processing will be assessed as they likely play a significant role of human emotional responses.…”