Is There a Hedonic Dimension to Odors?

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511546389.015

9 - Is There a Hedonic Dimension to Odors?

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009

Catherine Rouby and

Edited by

Rémi Gervais and

Catherine Rouby: Affiliation:
Associate professor of neuroscience, Université Claude Bernard
Moustafa Bensafi: Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Neurosciences et Systèmes Sensoriels, Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1, 50 avenue Tony Garnier, 69366 Lyon, Cedex 07, France
Catherine Rouby: Affiliation:
Université Lyon I
Benoist Schaal: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
Danièle Dubois: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
Rémi Gervais: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
A. Holley: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris

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Summary

The goal of psychophysics is to understand the relationships between variations in the physical environment and variations in our mental states. During the past century, psychophysics has evolved from pure sensory and physicalist conceptions to more perceptive and ecological ones, allowing us to include decision, attention, and expectation in the processing of sensory stimuli (Tiberghien, 1984). In the olfactory domain, memory psychophysics has been compared to perception psychophysics (Algom and Cain, 1991), and multidimensional scaling methods have been used to compare perception and imagery (Carrasco and Ridout, 1993). Thus, psychophysics has come to include more and more cognitive issues. Perception is recognized as categorical, inferential, and generic, leading to meaning and knowledge.

Hedonic responses to odors are very salient in folk psychology (David, Dubois, and Rouby, 2000) as well as in scientific accounts (see Rouby and Sicard, 1997, for a review). But can we study hedonic responses to odors with the usual psychophysical tools? Empirical descriptions and measures of preferences are clearly possible (Moncrieff, 1966; Köster, 1975), allowing a kind of affective psychophysics. But beyond preferences, if one is interested in the links between emotional responses and cognitive processing of odors, methodological questions arise concerning what is measured and how. Three main questions will be examined in this chapter:

Are the degree of pleasantness and the intensity of an odor reflecting the same dimension?
Is there a hedonic axis? Is a representation of affect possible on a psychophysical continuum, or are there clear-cut odor categories?
Are unpleasant odors symmetric with pleasant odors in relation to “zero affect”? That is, do they carry the same weight with respect to a neutral reference?

Type: Chapter
Information: Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition , pp. 140 - 159

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511546389.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2002

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