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

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 knowledg

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

Measuring self-reported affective feelings to odors and odorous products is a recent challenge for the food and cosmetic field, requiring the development of suited instruments. This paper finalizes a line of studies aimed at developing Emotion and Odor Scales (EOSs) in several cultures. Previously available for Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Singapore, new EOSs are presented here for the United States, Brazil, and China. These scales, developed with 350-540 participants per country, have been conceived to allow the measurement of affective feelings (e.g., emotions, moods, attitudes) in response to a wide range of odors including pleasant and unpleasant, food and non-food ones. Several affective categories were recurrent in the countries examined here: Disgust/Irritation, Happiness/Well-being, Sensuality/Desire, Energy, but also Soothing/Peacefulness and Hunger/Thirst, indicating a potential link between emotion and adaptive universal functions of olfaction such as danger avoidance, ingestion and social communication. For these common categories, similarity in affective responses generally reflected geographic proximity indicating also a strong influence of cultural aspects. Exceptions to this pattern were Singapore and China, with affective responses of Singaporeans being closer to those of Europeans. This series of studies allows us to propose a universal scale (UniGEOS) that might be used in the future for examination of other cultures. This scale comprises affective categories that we found to be culturally shared, enclosing the most frequently shared affective terms, and several culture-specific aspects that may be relevant in other cultures. This tool can be used in its complete form (25 affective terms) or as a short version with nine categories entitled Unpleasant feelings, Happiness/Delight, Sensuality/Desire, Energy, Soothing/ Peacefulness, Hunger/Thirst, Interest, Nostalgia and Spirituality

When Flexibility Is Stable: Implicit Long-Term Shaping of Olfactory Preferences

Preferences are traditionally assumed to be stable. However, empirical evidence such as preference modulation following choices calls this assumption into question. The evolution of such postchoice preference over long time spans, even when choices have been explicitly forgotten, has so far not been studied. In two experiments, we investigated this question by using a variant of the free choice paradigm: In a first session, participants evaluated the pleasantness of a number of odors. We then formed pairs of similarly rated odors, and asked participants to choose their favorite, for each pair. Participants were then presented with all odors again, and asked for another pleasantness rating. In a second session 1 week later, a third pleasantness rating was obtained, and participants were again asked to choose between the same options. Results suggested postchoice preference modulation immediately and 1 week after choice for both chosen and rejected options, even when choices were not explicitly remembered. A third experiment, using another paradigm, confirmed that choice can have a modulatory impact on preferences, and that this modulation can be long-lasting. Taken together, these findings suggest that although preferences appear to be flexible because they are modulated by choices, this modulation also appears to be stable over time and even without explicit recollection of the choice. These results bring a new argument to the idea that postchoice preference modulation could rely on implicit mechanisms, and are consistent with the recent proposal that cognitive dissonance reduction could to some extent be implicit

Emotions of odors and personal and home care products

Personal and home care products are nowadays similar in terms of hedonic value and performance. In this context, the consideration of their emotional value, in harmony with consumer expectations, can be a differentiating factor for fragrance development. This chapter aims at providing examples that show how emotional responses to odors, personal products, and home care products can be measured. After describing the strong influence of olfaction on emotional processing and the role of associative learning, we propose a definition of emotion and feelings. We focus on feelings, or the verbalization of emotions, by mainly referring to the conscious part of the emotional response elicited by odors and fragranced products. Although the unconscious part of the emotional response related to physiological and behavioral responses should not be underestimated, this topic is covered in Part 1 of the book, which is dedicated to the basic studies of emotions. The current chapter provides a review on a methodology developed to measure food-elicited feelings or fragrance-elicited feelings, with consideration of cross-cultural differences. Fundamental questions and critical choices that arise when such a démarche is undertaken are also highlighted. A series of results is presented to illustrate the use of this methodology in sensory settings for product development. Finally, we propose that investigations should be undertaken into the effects of changing the product label, packaging, and color of the fragranced products on consumer emotional expectations and on the overall emotional response when the product is experienced

An exploratory study to investigate emotion elicited by immersive ambiances

Food behaviour is modulated by the eating situation and environment. In a previous study, we investigated drink choices according to the ambiance by developing an immersive approach based on the concept of “having a drink in a bar”. Two bars (Modern vs. Traditional ambiance) were settled with a few piece of furniture (counter, tables and bar stools) made in raw wood for the Traditional bar and in blue retro-lighted translucent plastic for the Modern bar. A video-clip was projected on one wall: Red moving shapes associated to a “far west” music in the Traditional bar, and Blue moving bubbles associated to an “electro” music in the Modern bar. In each bar, 100 participants were asked which beverage they would like to drink (declarative). Specific drink selections were observed in this previous study: spirits in the Modern bar and beer, wine, hot chocolate and tea in the Traditional bar.To evaluate whether this contextual effect could be mediated by emotions, we designed a new series of experiments: In Study 1, 60 subjects per bar rated the ambiance on the 36-items GEOS1 questionnaire. In Study 2, 100 subjects per bar rated the ambiance on the 6-items simplification of GEOS questionnaire (ScentMoveTM 2). Both studies indicate that the traditional bar was more relaxing and serene whereas the modern bar was more energising and stimulating. In Study 3, 100 participants evaluated emotions elicited by beverage names using ScentMoveTM questionnaire out of the bar context (i.e. beverage names cited as appropriate with each bar in the previous study). Drinks chosen in the traditional bar were more relaxing than energising, the reverse was observed for drinks chosen in the modern bar. The coherence of emotions elicited by both the bars and the drinks supports the hypothesis that environment modulation of food behaviour could be mediated by emotions.References:1) C. Chrea et al. (2009). Mapping the Semantic Space for the Subjective Experience of Emotional Responses to Odors. Chemical Senses, 34, 49–62.2) C. Porcherot, S. Delplanque et al. (2010). How do you feel when you smell this? Optimization of a verbal measurement of odor-elicited emotions. Food Quality and Preference, 21, 938–947

How do you feel when you smell this ? Optimization of a verbal measurement of odor-elicited emotions

he Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS) was developed to measure the subjective affective experience (i.e., feeling) elicited by everyday odors. This study aimed to adapt the GEOS to commercial and development needs and had a threefold objective: (i) to verify whether the number of measurement terms in the GEOS questionnaire could be reduced; (ii) to investigate the suitability of this new questionnaire to differentiate the feelings evoked by the odors of different fragranced and flavored products; and (iii) to verify whether the measurement of feelings with this tool could add information to more traditional consumer liking measures. The original and modified questionnaires yielded comparable results for different shampoos. Results of characterizing various product categories with the new questionnaire indicated that it is relevant to differentiate the feelings evoked by odors from fragranced and flavored products, which can be perceptually distinct or similar. In addition, the verbal measurement of feelings provides insight into consumer liking, improving the discrimination of products that have similar liking scores

Measuring wanting without asking: The Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer paradigm under test

In consumer science, measuring liking is posited to be the best method to understand preferences and food choice behaviour. Consumer research shows that highly rewarding products are more often bought than slightly rewarding products. However, detecting clear differences in preferences for similarly rewarding products, which have just launched on the market, is not always easy to investigate with liking measures. Consequently, finding other methods measuring preferences for similarly rewarding products is necessary. A well-established theoretical framework used to study reward processing, the incentive salience theory, argues that the pursuit of a positive outcome depends on three distinct components: the motivation to obtain it (wanting), the pleasure felt during its consumption (liking), as well as its automatic associations and cognitive representations (learning). The Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm is a promising method used to investigate wanting in animals and humans. The human PIT task has been used in the chemosensory field in the presence of a single odour. In the present methodological studies, we further investigated the sensitivity of the PIT task to measure cue-triggered wanting by comparing two olfactory rewards. The first study used two olfactory stimuli with very different liking levels, whereas the second used two olfactory stimuli with similar liking levels. The results suggested that the PIT task was sensitive enough to detect the effort participants mobilized (wanting) to obtain two olfactory stimuli with very different liking levels, which was not the case for olfactory stimuli with similar liking levels. Implications of the PIT task for consumer research were discussed

Influence of food odorant names on the verbal measurement of emotions

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of food odorant names on feelings through the verbal measurement of emotions. Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, 88 participants were asked to report their feelings about 17 food odorants, randomly presented in six sensory booth sessions and in three conditions. In two conditions, an actual odorant was presented blind or in association with its name. In a third condition, only the odorant name was presented. Feeling measurements were conducted by using the ScentMoveTM questionnaire (Porcherot et al., 2010). Participants also rated the familiarity, acceptability, and typicality of the odorants. Results indicated that the odorant name information may influence the reported feelings, as already observed by several authors for traditional liking assessments, with differences among feeling dimensions and odorants. The odorants could be gathered into four groups, with either matches between expected feelings from the odorant name and experienced feelings from the smell evaluation for 8 odorants (i.e., caramel, citrus, mint), or discrepancies between expected and experience feelings for 9 odorants, and with no effect of the odorant name information (i.e., strawberry, vanilla), few, or high positive effects of the odorant name information (i.e., cola, chicken). Typicality scores did not differ between the different groups, showing that higher odorant typicality would not systematically result in a match between expectation and experience, or in a positive effect of the name information. It was therefore investigated in a second experiment if the group constitution could be explained by the odorant recognition scores that were measured from a free recognition task for the 17 odorants presented in the blind condition. The results of the two experiments are discussed in relation to dissimilarities between smell and food experiences and to lack of context

Sweet reward increases implicit discrimination of similar odors

Stimuli associated with emotional events signal the presence of potentially relevant situations, thus learning to rapidly identify this kind of stimuli can be highly beneficial. It has been demonstrated that individuals acquire a better perceptual representation of stimuli associated with negative and threatening emotional events. Here we investigated whether the same process occurs for stimuli associated with positive and rewarding emotional events. We used an appetitive Pavlovian conditioning paradigm during which one of two perceptually non-distinguishable odors was associated with a rewarding taste (i.e., chocolate). We investigated whether appetitive conditioning could improve the recognition of the odor associated with the reward, rendering it discriminable from its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Results revealed a dissociation between explicit perception and physiological reactions. Although participants were not able to explicitly perceive a difference, they reacted faster, inhaled more and had higher skin conductance responses when confronted with the reward-associated odor compared to its similar version that was never associated with the reward. Our findings have demonstrated that positive emotional associations can improve the implicit perceptual representation of odors, by triggering different physiological responses to odors that do not seem to be otherwise distinguishable