Odor Hedonics: Acquired Evaluative Meaning

Odors and the reactions of liking and disliking are so intimately intertwined that it would be difficult to object to the statement (Richardson and Zucco, 1989) that “it is clearly the hedonic meaning of odor that dominates odor perception” (p. 353). The fact that the affective/emotional consequences of odor stimuli are so powerful makes it possible for an economically important industry – perfumery – to thrive on the production of substances whose only real function is to elicit highly positive reactions. Also, because the principal distinctive properties of food flavors are provided by olfaction rather than by taste cues (Rozin, 1982), it could reasonably be argued that the whole of culinary culture is based largely on the same strong connection between evaluative meaning and odor. Besides eliciting the reactions of mere liking or disliking, odors can have considerable emotional impact (Ehrlichman and Halpern, 1988; Miltner et al., 1994). This bond between odors and emotions has long been recognized, and hence it may not be that surprising that the subcortical limbic system, which is considered to be of critical importance in the generation of emotions, was originally known as the rhinencephalon or the “smell brain” (Van Toller, 1988).

Although the evaluative and emotional components and consequences of odors have been given a lot of thought, it is less well appreciated that most human evaluative reactions toward odor stimuli are not fixed and innate, but are largely the products of associative learning (Engen, 1988; Bartoshuk, 1994).