My PhD dissertation, conducted in the Centre des Sciences du Gout at Dijon under the supervision of Dr Dominique Valentin, investigated the effect of cultural experience on odour categorisation and mental representation. To do so, I have carried out a series of experiments in France, Vietnam, and the United States using a large variety of everyday odours and several paradigms borrowed from various domains such as sensory analysis, experimental psychology, psychophysics and anthropology (e.g. rating task, sorting task, memory task, threshold measurement and surveys on cultural habits). The results of this cross-cultural project bring first evidence that the olfactory environment differs largely according to cultural factors (mainly related to food and cosmetic habits), especially between the two Western cultures and the Asian culture. The findings suggest furthermore that these latter factors have an influence on the way our knowledge on odours is organised in memory. At a macrostructural level of the olfactory space, odours are perceived in a categorical way according to similar dimensions in the three cultures. However, at a microstructural level, cultural differences are noticeable and may be linked essentially to cultural differences in the function attributed to odours. During my PhD, I was also involved in two cross-cultural projects: a first one aimed at evaluating the role of cultural experience and age in the rejection of cheese odours and an other aimed at evaluating the effect of cultural experience on odour-taste interactions.
For my postdoctoral research, I am currently involved in a research project on the emotional processing of odors. This research project, founded by Firmenich industries, is conducted in collaboration with Laurence Aymard, Isabelle Cayeux, Sylvain Delplanque, Didier Grandjean, Bénédicte Lecalvé, Christian Margot, David Sander, Klaus Scherer and Maria Inés Velazco. This project has two major issues of concern:
1) What exactly are the emotions elicited by odors and how they are organized? and
2) How are emotion episodes elicited and differentiated?
I focus mainly on the first issue of this project and I specifically investigate the nature of verbal labels that refer to the specific types of affective states produced by odours. In a series of consecutive studies, popular intuitions about which terms are the best suited to describe odour-elicited emotions will be examined. Subsequently, a structural equation modelling approach will be used on various sets of data collected with a large set of odorant stimuli, different group of participants and different experimental contexts. This will enable us to determine the underlying psychological dimensions required to differenciate odor-elicited emotions and thus to propose a new set of olfactory emotion scales for further empirical research.
