Department of Social, Health and Organizational Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Chem Senses. 2018 Jul 5;43(6):419-426. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjy029.
In a double-blind experiment, participants were exposed to facial images of anger, disgust, fear, and neutral expressions under 2 body odor conditions: fear and neutral sweat. They had to indicate the valence of the gradually emerging facial image. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, namely a "general negative evaluative state" hypothesis and a "discrete emotion" hypothesis. These hypotheses suggest 2 distinctive data patterns for muscle activation and classification speed of facial expressions. The pattern of results that would support a "discrete emotions perspective" would be expected to reveal significantly increased activity in the medial frontalis (eyebrow raiser) and corrugator supercilii (frown) muscles associated with fear, and significantly decreased reaction times (RTs) to "only" fear faces in the fear odor condition. Conversely, a pattern of results characterized by only a significantly increased corrugator supercilii activity together with decreased RTs for fear, disgust, and anger faces in the fear odor condition would support an interpretation in line with a general negative evaluative state perspective. The data support the discrete emotion account for facial affect perception primed with fear odor. This study provides a first demonstration of perception of discrete negative facial expressions using olfactory priming.
在一项双盲实验中，参与者在 2 种体臭条件下（恐惧和中性汗液）暴露于愤怒、厌恶、恐惧和中性表情的面部图像，他们必须指出逐渐出现的面部图像的效价。测试了两种替代假设，即“一般负评价状态”假设和“离散情绪”假设。这些假设为面部表情的肌肉激活和分类速度提供了 2 种独特的数据模式。支持“离散情绪视角”的结果模式预计会显示出与恐惧相关的额肌（挑眉肌）和皱眉肌（皱眉肌）活动显著增加，并且在恐惧气味条件下对“仅”恐惧面孔的反应时间（RT）显著降低。相反，在恐惧气味条件下，仅皱眉肌活动显著增加，同时对恐惧、厌恶和愤怒面孔的 RT 降低的结果模式支持与一般负评价状态视角一致的解释。数据支持使用恐惧气味启动的面部情感知觉的离散情绪解释。这项研究首次使用嗅觉启动证明了离散负面面部表情的感知。
