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Basic emotions elicited by odors and pictures.

Ilona Croy1, Selda Olgun, Peter Joraschky

  • 1Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Smell and Taste Clinic and Department of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Medicine, University of Dresden Medical School, Dresden, Germany. ilona.croy@tu-dresden.de

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The sense of smell can evoke happiness, disgust, and anxiety in people. However, olfactory cues are less effective at eliciting sadness or anger compared to visual stimuli.

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Sensory Science

Background:

  • Olfaction is strongly linked to emotional processing and memory.
  • Basic emotions are crucial for survival functions like ingestion and hazard avoidance.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if basic emotions can be evoked through the sense of olfaction in healthy individuals.
  • To compare olfactory and visual emotion elicitation.

Main Methods:

  • 119 participants identified odors evoking basic emotions (happiness, disgust, anger, anxiety, sadness, surprise).
  • 97 participants identified visual cues evoking the same emotions.
  • Odor and visual elicitor categories were analyzed.

Main Results:

  • Happiness and disgust were readily evoked by odors.
  • Anxiety was evoked by odors in three-quarters of participants.
  • Sadness and anger were more effectively evoked by visual cues than odors.
  • Olfactory elicitors were mainly from food, plants, and culture; visual elicitors were primarily human-related.

Conclusions:

  • The olfactory channel effectively elicits happiness, disgust, and anxiety.
  • Fewer differentiated emotions are reliably evoked via olfaction compared to other senses.
  • Olfactory emotion perception is limited to a few basic emotional states.