Chapter 10 - Examining Emotion Perception and Elicitation via Olfaction

Summary

In recent years, the development of sophisticated imaging technologies has significantly advanced the understanding of both human olfactory perception and affective neuroscience. This chapter discusses the basic properties of olfactory perception to illustrate how the anatomy and function of olfaction and emotion are closely intertwined. It focuses on olfactory hedonic perception and highlights mechanisms of basic emotional processing. The chapter explains how an examination of limbic brain areas involved in odor perception has resulted in considerable progress in delineating the neural mechanisms that support different aspects of emotion coding and emotion-related learning in the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and olfactory cortices. It talks about the malleability of olfactory hedonic perception. According to Rouby et al. odorhedonic judgments are influenced by nonhedonic characteristics of the odor, characteristics of the perceiver, and context of the stimulus or perceiver. Olfactory research has thus brought new insights into mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions.