“We found that participants were consistently able to brake more safely and appropriately in the presence of the lemon scent,” Martin reports. “It’s perhaps because the smell is citrus-y and alerting, and suggests that dangling a lemon-smelling air freshener in the car could make you a better driver.”
But as Martin’s use of words such as “citrus-y” shows, the psychology of smells is hard to pin down because they are so tough to describe. “The problem is, science doesn’t really understand smells. We have vague terms for them, and say things like it smells like this or that, but we don’t have chemical terms for most odors. I think all the answers to the effects of smell will come down to chemistry one day, but we haven’t yet got to that level,” he said. “Scent is described as the Cinderella of the senses because a considerable amount of nonsense is written and talked about it. Our research tries to test the effects of scent on behavior in a scientifically sound, methodical way.”
One thing is for sure, however: The effects of smell tend to be short-lived. “We get used to odors very quickly,” Martin explains. “Imagine waking into a strange environment — it will smell strange, but after a while the odor disappears because we become habituated to it. For our experiments, that means odor needs to be delivered in short bursts.”
For chocolate munchers, that means that you’ll have to be quick when smelling chocolate as you unwrap. “It’s definitely worth having a sniff ... for a minute or two for chocolate’s mood-enhancing qualities,” Martin says. “But don’t hang around too long, or the stress of not being able to eat it immediately might wipe out the effects completely.”
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