SEPAWA® CONGRESS 2022 

Speaker: Aurelie Soria-Frisch

Company: Starlab Barcelona SLU

Title: Emotional Response to Odours from Brain and Peripheral Signals

Abstract: Olfactory perception is considered a complex phenomenon and is associated directly with emotion and cognition. We estimate emotion as in Russel’s two-dimensional circumplex model of affect (Russel 1980) of valence and arousal. Valence corresponds to the horizontal axis and ranges from unpleasant to pleasant, whereas arousal corresponds to the vertical axis and ranges from calm to excited. For example, low arousal and low valence values refer to sadness; high arousal and high valence values refer to excitement/joy; low arousal and high valence values refer to relaxation. We aimed at investigating the level of valence and arousal in an invigorating, a relaxing, and a neutral odour and wanted to examine if indeed these odours were provoking the expected emotions from people who experienced them. We used our platform for data analyses with integrated wireless medical grade systems that included electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG) and outputted a unique emotion measure in the valence and arousal space through multisensory data fusion. Our proprietary methodological approach was applied on these signals to extract valence and arousal markers associated with fragrance response. The average emotional values of the participants in the experiment were high arousal for the invigorating odour, low arousal for the relaxing odour, and medium arousal and valence for the neutral odour (control). What we also noticed from this study is that the invigorating odour elicited low valence (i.e., unpleasantness), whereas the relaxing odour elicited as expected high valence (pleasantness). We have used the same features for a variety of affective applications ranging from exhibitions, museums, communication material and beauty treatments with great success. Eventually we are targeting to enable our output features to characterize the sense of well-being, currently an important claim of products in the cosmetic and fragrance sector.