Abstract
Successful social interaction relies on the accurate decoding of other peoples’ emotional signals, and their contextual integration. However, little is known about how contextual odors may lead to modulation of cortical processing in response to facial expressions. We investigated how unpleasant and pleasant contextual background odors affected emotion perception and cortical event-related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of faces expressing happy, neutral and disgusted facial expressions. Faces were, regardless of expression, rated more positively in the pleasant odor condition and more negatively in the unpleasant odor condition. Faces were overall rated as more emotionally arousing in the presence of an odor, irrespective of its valence. Contextual odors also interacted with facial expressions, such that happy faces were rated as especially non-arousing in the unpleasant odor condition. The early, face-sensitive N170 ERP component also displayed an interaction effect. Here, disgusted faces were affected by the odor context such that the N170 revealed a relatively larger negativity in the context of a pleasant odor compared with an unpleasant odor. There were no odor effects on the responses to faces in other measured ERP components (P1, VPP, P2, and LPP). These results suggest that odors bias socioemotional perception early stages of the visual processing stream. However, effects may vary across emotional expressions and measurements.
Highlights
Other people, and social relationships, are critical for our survival, and human faces receive preferential processing in dedicated neural networks (Haxby et al, 2000; Palermo and Rhodes, 2007; Rellecke et al, 2013)
There was a main effect of odor, F(2,114) = 5.80, p = 0.004, η2p < 0.09, indicating that the faces were rated as more negative overall in the unpleasant odor condition compared to pleasant, t(173) = −3.62, p < 0.001, d = −0.27, and no-odor conditions, t(173) = −2.76, p = 0.006, d = −0.21
Social processes are contingent on rapid, implicit integration of emotionally relevant information from different sensory channels, for example, understanding whether the facial emotional expression of another person is affected by the immediate environmental context
Summary
Social relationships, are critical for our survival, and human faces receive preferential processing in dedicated neural networks (Haxby et al, 2000; Palermo and Rhodes, 2007; Rellecke et al, 2013). Previous research shows that any odor may increase the speed of behavioral responses in a facial emotion recognition task (Seubert et al, 2010a). Some evidence indicates that happy expressions are recognized faster in a pleasant odor context (Leppanen and Hietanen, 2003). Both pleasant and unpleasant odor contexts may enhance recognition accuracy for disgusted faces (Seubert et al, 2010a,b). Some studies suggest that face perception is influenced by a valence-independent odor effect (presumably related to the arousing properties of odors) whereas other studies suggest that emotionally congruent information facilitate facial perception
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