When a person feels an odor, he / she shows an emotional reaction of "pleasant / unpleasant" and "like / dislike".In some cases, the emotional response to odor is congenitally determined by genetic factors, while in other cases it is acquiredly regulated and determined by experience and learning.However, no investigation has been conducted on odors that do not match the innate and acquired emotional responses, that is, odors that feel "good scent but dislike" or "bad odor but like".
Associate Professor Takeshi Okamoto of Kyushu University Institute of Core Education and Masayuki Hamakawa, a 5th year doctoral student of the Faculty of Systems and Life Sciences, have this time intuitively and instinctively set "pleasant / unpleasant" as the axis for evaluating the emotional response to odor. Emotional responses and "likes / dislikes" were set as axes for evaluating empirical and acquired emotional responses, and olfactory cognitive experiments were conducted on 36 types of odorants.
As a result, in the case of odors in which "pleasant / unpleasant" and "like / dislike" match, the linguistic expression of the odor (fruit scent, almond odor, etc.) tends to be uniquely determined as the intensity of the scent increases.On the other hand, for odors in which the evaluations of "pleasant / unpleasant" and "like / dislike" do not match, there was a tendency that the linguistic expression of the odor was not determined regardless of the intensity.
This study suggests that the instinctive "pleasant / unpleasant" and the empirical "like / dislike" match / disagreement affect the verbalization of odors.It is known that the sensory information of odor is also processed in the amygdala related to emotions and the hippocampus related to memory, but the detailed mechanism is not yet known.It is expected that the results of this research will advance the elucidation of the mechanism of odor information processing and verbalization in the brain.
Paper information:[Flavour and Fragrance Journal] The effect of different emotional states on olfactory perception: A preliminary study
