Abstract
In real-life situations, emotional information is often expressed through multiple sensory channels, with cross-talk between channels. Previous research has established that odor environments regulate the recognition of facial expressions. Therefore, this study combined event-related potentials (ERPs) with a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the effect of food odor context on the recognition of facial expressions and its time course. Fifty-four participants were asked to identify happy, fearful, and neutral faces in an odor context (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral). Electroencephalography (EEG) was performed to extract event-related potentials (ERPs). Behaviorally, unpleasant food odors triggered faster recognition of facial expressions, especially fearful ones. ERP results found that in the early stage, unpleasant food odors within 80–110 ms evoked a larger P100 amplitude than pleasant food odors and no odors, which showed that the unpleasant odor environment promoted the rapid processing of facial expressions. Next, the interaction between odor environment and facial expressions occurred during the middle stage, and the fearful expression evoked a smaller VPP (vertex positive potential) amplitude than the happy and neutral expressions when exposed to the unpleasant food odor environment. This result indicates that unpleasant odor environment consumed fewer cognitive resources when judging fearful expression, showing the promoting effect of mood coherence effect. These findings provided evidence for how people chose odor environments to facilitate the recognition of facial expressions, and highlighted the advantages of unpleasant food odors in communicating emotional information across the olfactory and visual pathways.
Highlights
For individuals with social attributes, emotional stimulation is one of the most important external signals
A 3 × 3 repeated-measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to evaluate the mean amplitude of EEG components (P100, N170, vertex positive potential (VPP), and late positive potential (LPP)) induced by odors and facial expressions
Culture plays an important role in odor and food perception (Ferdenzi et al, 2011, 2013), so future research can assess current results from a cultural perspective. Both behavioral and physiological evidence suggested that food odor environment may regulate the recognition of facial expressions
Summary
For individuals with social attributes, emotional stimulation is one of the most important external signals. Emotions can be expressed through a variety of media, such as faces, bodies, and voices. As a way to convey important information about an individual’s internal state and intention, the rapid decoding of facial expression is crucial for people in society (Palermo and Rhodes, 2007; Rellecke et al, 2012). In real-life situations, faces rarely are perceived as single entities and most likely appear within a situational context, which may have a strong impaction how they are perceived (Wieser and Brosch, 2012). The influence of external situational information causes us to process emotional information rarely only in a single channel, such as visual channel. Emotional information is often expressed through multiple sensory channels, with cross-talk between channels. The results showed that emotional voice influenced the emotional recognition of facial expression (de Gelder and Vroomen, 2000). The results showed that emotional voice influenced the emotional recognition of facial expression (de Gelder and Vroomen, 2000). Van den Stock et al (2009) found that the music played by musical instrumentation can affect individuals’ emotional recognition of body expressions
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