olfaction how specific odors affect emotional response and memory
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Olfaction: How specific odors affect emotional response and memory
Have you ever recognized a specific smell that made you feel happy, disgusted or
made you remember a person, place or event from the past? One commonly held
assumption is that some perfume companies want people to believe that they have created
sexual attractants that act as pheromones to influence behavior between desirable
partners. From this assumption one might be tempted to conclude that specific odors
influence mood and emotional response in humans. Is this really the case?
In a study done on children and adolescents, Stevenson and Repacholi (2003)
found that having Ss smell male sweat made them feel disgusted. Only female
adolescents disliked male sweat and could identify it. Children in the experiment did not
find smelling male sweat as disgusting as adolescents. The dislike of the odor of male
sweat concluded a factor in social response based on odor identification. In a similar
study of odor recognition, Zuco and Gesualdo (2003) implied that memory for odors
show a distinctive and separate memory system. 10 Ss were asked to smell 30 odors and
to perform different tasks in naming the sent, visualizing an image and describing a
specific time I their lives while smelling the odors...