Abstract
Does hedonic appreciation evolve differently for pleasant odors and unpleasant odors during normal aging? To answer this question we combined psychophysics and electro-encephalographic recordings in young and old adults. A first study showed that pleasant odorants (but not unpleasant ones) were rated as less pleasant by old adults. A second study validated this decrease in hedonic appreciation for agreeable odors and further showed that smelling these odorants decreased beta event-related synchronization in aged participants. In conclusion, the study offers new insights into the evolution of odor hedonic perception during normal aging, highlighting for the first time a change in processing pleasant odors.
Highlights
One important aspect of olfaction is its salient affective dimension that can entail withdrawal or approach behaviors [1,2]
The present study set out to examine whether aging influences hedonic appreciation of pleasant odors and unpleasant odors differently
The first result of interest was that the hedonic appreciation of pleasant odors decreased in older compared to young adults
Summary
One important aspect of olfaction is its salient affective dimension that can entail withdrawal or approach behaviors [1,2]. Evidence of the existence of two different systems dedicated to treating aversive and appetitive chemosensory stimuli has been provided by psychophysical and neuroimaging studies showing that unpleasant odors are processed faster than pleasant ones [3,4,5], inducing specific patterns of autonomic [6,7] and olfactomotor responses [8,9,10] and specific neural activation [11,12,13,14,15,16] How these two opposite facets of hedonic responses to odors evolve with age remains unclear today. The main aim of the present study was to investigate how hedonic appreciations of both pleasant and unpleasant odors evolve with age by using psychophysical and neurophysiological methods
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