Chemical Senses Vol. 30 No. suppl 1 © Oxford University
Press 2005; all rights reserved
Odor-associative Learning and Emotion: Effects on Perception and Behavior
Department of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA
Correspondence to be sent to: Rachel S. Herz, e-mail: rachel_herz@brown.edu
Key words: associative learning, behavior, emotion, motivation, odor, olfaction, perception
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Introduction |
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Associative learning, the process by which one event or item comes to be linked to another through experience, is critically involved in human cognition and behavior. It has been proposed that associative learning principles can explain human perceptual and cognitive–behavioral responses to odors (Engen, 1991
;
Herz, 2001). Specifically, it is
hypothesized that odor hedonic perception and odor-related behavior results from a
learned association between an odor and the emotional context in which that odor was
first encountered. The process is proposed to operate and produce effects as follows:
(i) the emotion paired with an odor becomes associated to the odor and imbues it
with meaning, thus influencing hedonic perception; and (ii) an odor can elicit the
emotion associated with its prior exposure and have a general impact on mood and
mood-related behavior. Thus, emotional odor-associative learning can explain both how
odors come to be liked or disliked as well |
Current experimental evidence |
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Acknowledgements |
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