The Odor Awareness Scale: A New Scale for Measuring Positive and Negative Odor Awareness

Abstract

The Odor Awareness Scale (OAS) is a questionnaire designed to assess individual differences in awareness of odors in the environment. The theory that odor awareness can be distinguished in awareness of negative (to be avoided) odors and positive (to be approached) odors was tested using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on the 34-item questionnaire after completion by 525 respondents. CFA (after deletion of 2 items) showed good fit of the 2-factor theory, resulting in a positive awareness subscale (11 items, Cronbach's alpha = .77) and a negative awareness subscale (21 items, Cronbach's alpha = .80). Furthermore, reports of sickness from environmental odors were correlated with the negative odor awareness factor, not the positive odor awareness factor. Respondents scoring high on the overall sum score of the OAS showed significantly better olfactory performance on an odor perception test battery than respondents with a low score. These results suggest a causal relation between awareness of potentially negative odors, olfactory performance and experiencing health effects from environmental odor exposure, that warrants further investigation.

Individual Variability in the Awareness of Odors: Demographic Parameters and Odor Identification Ability

“…The main aim of this study was to test the use of the OAS (Smeets et al 2008) as a possible tool to discriminate between different groups of people (e.g., by age or by smoking habits) as a function of the importance they give to Star indicates the significant analyses after the application of Bonferroni's correction for multiple comparisons (corrected α=0.007). OIP mean values (with standard deviations in parentheses) in a given row with different letters were significantly different in post hoc comparisons (values labeled with or sharing the same letter were not different from each other) F female, M male, non-S nonsmokers, S smokers, non-E naive, E experts chemosensory stimuli in everyday experience.…”

“…The OAS (Smeets et al 2008) was presented to the participants at the beginning of the study. The original questionnaire is composed of 33 questions related to a number of olfactory experiences; one person may detect deteriorated food (e.g., sour milk), notice others' body odor, or rejoice at pleasant ambient odors.…”

“…Here, we presented an Italian version of the questionnaire, and we decided not to use some questions that we believed to measure (but indirectly) other aspects of odor awareness (i.e., question 30 focuses on the relevance of sensory or body part losses, and questions 33a, 33b, and 33c focus on commercial products' evaluation; cf. Smeets et al 2008). Additionally, we decided to use a nine-point scale (ranging from 1-extremely disagree to 9-extremely agree) to collect responses rather than the original fivepoint scale, as responses in the other questionnaires used in the laboratory were collected by a similar scale.…”

Olfactory Perception is Positively Linked to Anxiety in Young Adults

“…Within the olfactory testing part of the session, olfactory sensitivity/odour threshold was tested first, followed by discrimination and identification with a 3 min break after each test to prevent olfactory adaptation, as suggested by Hummel (2004). In addition to the questionnaires mentioned above, for the purposes of the study the data were primarily collected for, there were others that were completed by the participants, namely the Czech versions of the Childhood Gender Nonconformity scale (CGN, Bailey et al 1995), Continuous Gender Identity scale (CGI, Bailey et al 1995), Empathy Quotient (EQ, Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright 2004), the Odor Awareness scale (Smeets et al 2008), and a survey on olfactory-related behaviours from early childhood to present. For this reason the entire session took, in most individuals, 75 to 90 min.…”

Effect of Smell in Space Perception

“…As a conjoint project with the Department of Psychology from the University of Tsukuba, an existing Odor Awareness Scale OAS [16] was administered to establish the olfactory background of the participant in terms of the importance of smell in daily life activities and situations. The questionnaire contains 32 items considering smell in different categories.…”