Mohr C, Röhrenbach C M, Landis T, Regard M
Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, Switzerland.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2001 Aug;23(4):484-9. doi: 10.1076/jcen.23.4.484.1236.
To assess and compare the quantitive and qualitative aspects of verbal associations of olfaction and audition, we conducted two verbal category fluency tasks, one consisting of the generation of 'smelling' associations and the other of 'auditory' associations. The responses of the 40 subjects on these fluency tasks were rated as pleasant or unpleasant by themselves as well as by an independent group of 40 subjects. In addition, all 80 healthy, right-handed subjects rated their momentary emotional state on a visual analog scale. The mean number of words generated by the 40 subjects did not differ between the two tasks, and in both tasks pleasant associations were more frequent than unpleasant associations. However, for all subjects, the proportion of pleasant associations was significantly higher in the olfactory compared to the auditory fluency task. The finding of more pleasant associations in both tasks confirms previous reports, but the pronounced effect in the olfactory task suggests that odors may be more hedonically coded than other sensory modalities, i.e., audition. Although there is evidence that the majority of odors are initially perceived as unpleasant, when retrieved from memory, pleasant connotations seem to dominate. The possible mechanisms for this dissociation are discussed.
为了评估和比较嗅觉和听觉言语联想在数量和质量方面的情况，我们进行了两项言语类别流畅性任务，一项任务是生成与“嗅觉”相关的联想，另一项任务是生成与“听觉”相关的联想。40名受试者在这些流畅性任务中的反应由他们自己以及另外40名独立受试者评为愉快或不愉快。此外，所有80名健康的右利手受试者用视觉模拟量表对他们当时的情绪状态进行评分。40名受试者在两项任务中生成的单词平均数没有差异，并且在两项任务中愉快联想都比不愉快联想更频繁。然而，对于所有受试者来说，与听觉流畅性任务相比，嗅觉流畅性任务中愉快联想的比例显著更高。两项任务中愉快联想更多这一发现证实了先前的报道，但嗅觉任务中的显著效果表明，气味在享乐编码方面可能比其他感觉模态（即听觉）更强。尽管有证据表明大多数气味最初被感知为不愉快，但从记忆中提取时，愉快的内涵似乎占主导。本文讨论了这种分离的可能机制。
