Subliminal Smells Can Guide Social Preferences

It is widely accepted that unconscious processes can modulate judgments and behavior, but do such influences affect one's daily interactions with other people? Given that olfactory information has relatively direct access to cortical and subcortical emotional circuits, we tested whether the aff...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPsychological science Vol. 18; no. 12; pp. 1044 - 1049
Main Authors Li, Wen, Moallem, Isabel, Paller, Ken A., Gottfried, Jay A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA Blackwell Publishing 01.12.2007
SAGE Publications
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Awareness
Bottles
Choice Behavior
Circuits
Emotional expression
Emotions
Escape
Face
Facial Expression
Female
Heart rate
Humans
Likeability
Male
Memory
Neurology
Odorants
Odors
Olfactory perception
Preferences
Priming
Psychology
Research Reports
Senses
Signal Detection, Psychological
Smell
Social Perception
Social psychology
Sublimation, Psychological
Subliminal perception
Sympathy
Thresholds
Unconscious mind
Unconsciousness
Unpleasant
Visual Perception
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Summary:It is widely accepted that unconscious processes can modulate judgments and behavior, but do such influences affect one's daily interactions with other people? Given that olfactory information has relatively direct access to cortical and subcortical emotional circuits, we tested whether the affective content of subliminal odors alters social preferences. Participants rated the likeability of neutral faces after smelling pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant odors delivered below detection thresholds. Odor affect significantly shifted likeability ratings only for those participants lacking conscious awareness of the smells, as verified by chance-level trial-by-trial performance on an odor-detection task. Across participants, the magnitude of this priming effect decreased as sensitivity for odor detection increased. In contrast, heart rate responses tracked odor valence independently of odor awareness. These results indicate that social preferences are subject to influences from odors that escape awareness, whereas the availability of conscious odor information may disrupt such effects.
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ISSN:0956-7976
1467-9280
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02023.x