0000000000825430
AUTHOR
Alessia Baccarani
Relaxing effects of music and odors on physiological recovery after highly demanding executive tasks
International audience
Age differences in olfactory affective responses: evidence for a positivity effect and an emotional dedifferentiation
International audience; Studies on aging and hedonic judgment of odors have never been addressed within the empirical frameworks of age-related changes in emotion which state that advancing age is associated with a reduced negativity bias and a less pronounced differentiation between hedonic valence and emotional intensity judgments. Our aim was to examine and extend these age-related effects into the field of odors. Thirty-eight younger adults and 40 older adults were asked to evaluate the hedonic valence, emotional intensity, and familiarity of 50 odors controlled for their pleasantness. Compared to younger adults, older adults rated unpleasant odorants as less unpleasant and showed an in…
Behavioral and physiological bases of relaxing and stimulating effects of odors and music
This doctoral thesis examines the psychological and physiological mechanisms as well as the factors involved in the relaxing and stimulating effect (emotional activation) of pleasant odors, building on research work from the music domain. In Studies 1a and 1b, we observed that the modulation of the activation induced by odors influenced temporal information processing by speeding-up or slowing-down the rate of the internal clock pacemaker, similarly to what was previously reported using musicalstimuli. Moreover, prior verbalsuggestion attributing incongruent activation properties to the odors eliminated these effects, highlighting the importance of a priori expectancies on olfactory-induced…