The Effects Of Odor On Emotional Face Identification

Odors not only affects our emotions,but it also has a certain impact on recognizing the face of others.In recent years,more and more researchers have begun to pay attention to the effect of olfactory cue on face identification,but few studies have examined the effect of odor on emotional face identification from a more comprehensive perspective.Therefore,this study selected college students as research subjects and used emotion identification tasks to explore the effect of odor background on emotional face identification.The study was divided into two experiments.Approximately 200 college students were selected as subjects.Experiments used different odors and different emotional face images as stimuli materials,and used emotion identification tasks to study the effect of odors on emotional facial expression identification in terms of emotional valence and emotional types.The results showed that:(1)Odors also has an effect on the identification of emotional faces.Under the fresh and neutral odor,participants have the highest identification rate of positive emotions and the shortest reaction time.The rate of identification of emotional face types from fast to slow was happiness,surprise,sadness,fear,disgust and anger;in foul odor,subjects had the highest identification rate and the shortest reaction time on negative emotions.The speed of identification from fast to slow was happiness,sadness,surprise,fear,disgust and anger.(2)Under different odor conditions,the happy in the facial expression types has the advantage of identification.That is no matter what the odor conditions,the subjects' identification of the happiness expression is better than other five kinds of expression.The accuracy of other expressions from high to low is surprise,sadness,disgust,anger and fear.The results of the study indicate that odors do affect people's judgment of facial emotions,both in terms of emotional valence and emotional types.Different odors have different effects.