The psychological effect of scents

Many poets and philosophers have been speculating on the emotional reactions provoked by odors but it is only recently that scientific studies on the matter are available.

The group of Warwick has demonstrated with an important experiment (Kirk smith, Van Toller, and Dodd, 1983) the possibility of establishing a long-lasting association between an odor and an emotional state that could be provoked later on by the mere perception of the same odor.
In these experiments, the emotional state experienced was negative. It was produced as a reaction to a stressful situation, but in the same period, the studies of King suggested the possibility to induce positive emotions and states of relaxation using the same method.

In both cases, the conditioning happened at unconscious level, and the persons studied in the experiment ignored that they were being exposed to a fragrance. The odor was used in a subliminal manner which means that it was so weak that they were not consciously aware of it.

Surely every one of us has been unconsciously conditioned in such manner since childhood by the smells that form our “olfactory culture”, and it would be possible to use smells as olfactory scenography in public events in order to control the emotional state of whole publics. In such case the common emotional strengthens thee state of each one, as effect of mass psychology.

For instance, it is easy to understand that the smells that belong to our childhood experiences of summer holidays will have a positive antistress effect and those familiar odors belonging to home and family will be reassuring and able to give a familiar value to anything.
It is indeed possible to anticipate the psychological effect of a great number of scents on a particular public, knowing the contents of their common olfactory culture.

Our olfactory memory works in such a way that the older the olfactory memory, ( the nearest to infancy), the most powerful is the emotion it will provoke and the easier will it be activated.
The more ancient they are the olfactory memories, the deeper are the emotions that they awaken and the first infancy olfactory memories are indeed the ones more likely to generate positive and pleasurable emotions.

Olfactory memories are indelible, they will never vanish, but some are stronger than others. Their force depends on the emotional intensity that was experienced in concomitance with the smells, but it also depends on the repetitiveness of the experience during a period of time and also on the importance of the experience in the learning process of a person.