Scent Counts for More Than You Think

Interesting article from msn.com.


Sniffing out likability, one person at a time
07/12/2007 1:55:05 PM
Sniffing someone out has taken on a whole new meaning.

Scientists have discovered that others' perceptions of a person's scent can make it or break it for them socially. In a new study, they've discovered that if a person dislikes your scent, even though it registers subconsciously, they're more likely to dislike you, and vice-versa.

"We evaluate people every day and make judgments about who we like or don't like," Wen Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine in Illinois, and lead author of the study, said in a release.

"We may think our judgments are based only on various conscious bits of information, but our senses also may provide subliminal perceptual information that affects our behaviour."
Li and his colleagues' findings are published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Study participants were asked to smell three scents contained in three bottles.

Lemon was the "good" scent, sweat was the "bad" scent and an ethereal scent was considered neutral. The scents were administered in different concentrations.The study participants were given the scents to sniff and then shown a picture of a face with a neutral expression. They were asked to rank the face on a scale ranging from extremely likable to extremely unlikable.
In participants who were conscious of the odour they were sniffing, scent bias didn't come into play and they could rank the faces independently of smell.

The researchers found many of the study's participants were not aware of many of the odours in very low concentrations. However, an increase in their heart rates showed their bodies were registering the scent regardless.

In those participants unaware of the scent they were registering, negative scents correlated strongly with negative ratings of the pictures shown. That meant that if a person was sniffing a bad odour, they were more likely to accord the face a low likability ranking.

"The study suggests that people conscious of the barely noticeable scents were able to discount that sensory information and just evaluate the faces," Li said. "It only was when smell sneaked in without being noticed that judgments about likability were biased."