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Chemical Senses Advance Access published online on March 23, 2005
Chemical Senses, doi:10.1093/chemse/bji029
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
Accepted February 24, 2005

Article

The Effect of Emotion and Personality on Olfactory Perception

Denise Chen 1* and Pamela Dalton 2

1 Psychology Department, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
2 Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Denise Chen, E-mail: xdchen{at}rice.edu


  Abstract

It is well established that both the emotional tone of sensory stimuli and the personality characteristics of an individual can bias sensory perception. What has largely been unexplored is whether the current emotional state of an individual has a similar effect, and how it works together with other factors. Here we carry out a comprehensive study to examine how olfactory perception is affected by the emotional tone of the stimuli, and the personality and current emotional state of the individual. Subjects reported experiencing happiness, sadness, negativity/hostility and neutrality when exposed to corresponding emotionally themed video clips, and in each case, smelled a suprathreshold pleasant, an unpleasant and a neutral odorant. The time taken for the subject to detect each odorant and the olfactory intensity were recorded. We found that women detected the pleasant odorant faster than the neutral one. In addition, personality modulated reaction time and olfactory intensity, such that neurotic and anxious individuals were selectively biased toward affective rather than neutral odorants. Finally, current emotional state augmented intensity in men but not in women, and differentially influenced the response time. These findings provided new insights into the effects of emotion and personality on olfactory perception.

Keywords: emotion; olfactory perception; personality.
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O. Pollatos, R. Kopietz, J. Linn, J. Albrecht, V. Sakar, A. Anzinger, R. Schandry, and M. Wiesmann
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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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