Variability of Affective Responses to Odors: Culture, Gender, and Olfactory Knowledge

Abstract

Emotion and odor scales (EOS) measuring odor-related affective feelings were recently developed for three different countries (Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Singapore). The first aim of this study was to investigate gender and cultural differences in verbal affective response to odors, measured with EOS and the usual pleasantness scale. To better understand this variability, the second aim was to investigate the link between affective reports and olfactory knowledge (familiarity and identification). Responses of 772 participants smelling 56-59 odors were collected in the three countries. Women rated odors as more intense and identified them better in all countries, but no reliable sex differences were found for verbal affective responses to odors. Disgust-related feelings revealed odor-dependent sex differences, due to sex differences in identification and categorization. Further, increased odor knowledge was related to more positive affects as reported with pleasantness and odor-related feeling evaluations, which can be related to top-down influences on odor representation. These top-down influences were thought, for example, to relate to beliefs about odor properties or to categorization (edible vs. nonedible). Finally, the link between odor knowledge and olfactory affect was generally asymmetrical and significant only for pleasant odors, not for unpleasant ones that seemed to be more resistant to cognitive influences. This study, for the first time using emotional scales that are appropriate to the olfactory domain, brings new insights into the variability of affective responses to odors and its relationship to odor knowledge.

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

“…One way to tackle this issue would be to present another odor that would be neutral enough not to constitute a primary reward but would be similarly rich to the chocolate in term perceptual characteristic. However, given the vast interindividual variability in hedonic odor perception (e.g., Delplanque et al, 2008;Distel et al, 1999;Ferdenzi et al, 2013), it appears very difficult to find a consensual neutral odor. Moreover, the learning process to associate two neutral stimuli is different from the one to associate an emotional stimulus with a neutral one.…”

Affective semantic space of scents. Towards a universal scale to measure self-reported odor-related feelings

“…When using a specific range of products, it is very likely that only one type of function would be targeted, thus automatically weakening the discriminative power of the EOSs, which may also miss affective aspects related to that specific category of products. Indeed, EOSs do not attach to the odor and the EOSs responses to it has been studied and described elsewhere (Ferdenzi et al 2013). Therefore, another limit of our tool is that there is some uncontrolled variation in the affective response to odors due to associated products and contexts in memory (e.g., food vs. nonfood contexts).…”

Mutual Olfactory Recognition Between Mother and Child

“…Previous studies have demonstrated links between familiarity and pleasantness of odours (e.g. Distel et al 1999;Ferdenzi et al, 2013), which may underpin this relationship, especially as correlations between familiarity and odour pleasantness are stronger for pleasant than unpleasant odours (Delplanque et al, 2008).…”