Gender differences in the perception of pungency

Abstract

Males and females judged the intensity of the typical pungent stimulus CO 2 , presented by nose and by mouth, employing two scaling procedures: magnitude estimation and magnitude matching. The two groups differed in their perception of CO 2 pungency only when it was judged in the nose. Perceived nasal pungency grew as a power function of CO 2 concentration, with an exponent of 2.2 for females and 1.6 for males, and the magnitude matching test showed that, relative to their perception of sucrose sweetness, females perceived pungency more intense throughout the range studied. Perceived buccal pungency grew for both groups as the 1.1 power of CO 2 concentration, and the magnitude matching test, employing again sweetness as the reference modality, revealed no intensity differences in the perception of buccal pungency between the genders. It is suggested that the susceptibility of the nasal environment to hormonal and neural influences may account for the differences in perceived pungency between males and females.

Chemesthesis from volatile organic compounds: Psychophysical and neural responses

“…Scaling of chemesthesis has entailed principally vapors of carbon dioxide, an odorless irritant. The average exponent of the psychophysical power function over five studies equaled 1.66 ± 0.30 [4][5][6][7]39]. The average value of 1.42 ± 0.33 for the NMP in the present case compares quite favorably.…”

Interactions between Co2 Oral Pungency and Taste

“…The presence of sucrose, in the concentration range studied, does not alter either perceived buccal pungency rate of change, which maintains its typical exponent of about 1.1 (Cometto-Muñiz and Noriega 1985), or the relative position of the stimulusresponse function on the perceived pungency axis. The same holds for the presence of CO 2 in sucrose sweetness evaluation: CO 2 is unable to modify significantly the sweetness psychophysical function exponent or its relative position.…”

“…CO 2 has been previously chosen as a typical common chemical sense stimulant in investigations that have explored nasal and oral pungency perception Dunn et al 1982;García-Medina and Cain 1982;Cometto-Muñiz and Noriega 1985). The use of CO 2 allowed us to present the pungent substance and each of the tastants simultaneously, since latency for maximum CO 2 oral pungency (about 5 s; see Cometto-Muñiz and Noriega 1985) is not very different from the latencies for maximum intensities of the four tastants we used (Bujas and Ostojcˇić 1939;Birch et al 1980). 2 Experiment 1: Effect of various concentrations of four tastants on CO 2 oral pungency perception 2.1 Method 2.1.1 Subjects.…”

“…Previously (Cometto-Muñiz and Noriega 1985) we explored the exponent of the psychophysical function for the perceived buccal pungency evoked by CO 2 and found it to be remarkably constant in relation to gender (1.1 for males, 1.2 for females) and scaling method (1.1 for magnitude estimation, 1.2 for magnitude matching). This constancy encouraged us to use one of the concentrations of the previously studied CO 2 range as an anchor to compare the CO 2 oral pungency function to the ones that we would obtain in this investigation with the same CO 2 concentrations but in the presence of three different levels of each of four tastants.…”

Thresholds for odor and nasal pungency

“…A notable exception to the latter might be carbon dioxide, whose characteristic pungency, evoked both nasally and orally (19,22,24,31,34), is almost odorless (13).…”