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17 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
What were the four odours used in the study
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Describe how the odours were delivered and explain advantages of delivering them in this way. |
olfactometer regulates flow precisely / administers clean (medical) air in between tests (i.e. highly controlled)so differences in responses unlikely to be affected by differences in stimuli or residual/order effects (i.e. highly valid also reliable) |
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Give features of the sample |
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Identify the controls used |
all participants sitting on a chair / 70 cm from computer / fixation cross / told to exhale through nose at quiet tone / quiet tone same volume at ear for all participants / 22 Hz, 200 ms duration / told to inhale through nose at loud sound / faces shown for 500 ms/in centre of screen / screen turned black / 10 000 ms interstimulus interval / clean medical air during interstimulus interval / 5 min rest every 40 trials |
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Background |
Facial attractiveness is a socially important cue and has been studied extensively, for example Rhodes et al. (1998) studied facial symmetry and its relationship to attractiveness. Is attractiveness determined by other sensory cues such as olfaction? one study has shown that the perfume ‘shalimar’ led to significantly higher ratings of softness and sexiness when compared with no perfume condition. |
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Variables (IV and DV) |
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Aim/hypothesis |
To determine whether briefly presented olfactory cues can modulate visual judgments of facial attractiveness, and in particular, to ascertain whether olfactory cues of differing hedonic value (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant) can enhance and/or reduce the perceived attractiveness of a seen face. |
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Explain the design of the experiment |
A within-participants repeated measures experimental design was used with the factors of facial attractiveness (high vs. low) and odor pleasantness (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral). The experimental session consisted of 3 blocks of 40 randomized trials (i.e., participants completed 120 trials in total): Each face was randomly presented 3 times during each experimental session, once with a pleasant odor, once with an unpleasant odor, and once with a neutral odor (i.e., clean air). |
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Why did the experimenters chose presenting male faces to females only? |
We only presented male faces to female participants in the present experiment for 2 reasons: first, because previous research has suggested that females may be more sensitive to the effects of olfactory cues than males (e.g., see Doty et al. 1985; Chen and Haviland-Jones 2000; Brand and Millot 2001; Spence 2002), and second, be- cause it has been suggested that females might rely more on olfactory cues in mating behavior than males (see Herz and Inzlicht 2002). |
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Outline concentrations of diluted odourants |
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Describe apparatus |
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Explain the procedure of the experiment |
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Conclusions |
Female participants judged male faces as being slightly (but significantly) less attractive when presented with an unpleasant odour than with a pleasant or neutral odour. They perceived no difference in attractiveness when presented with a pleasant odour compared with a neutral odour. |
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Strengths |
High levels of control, randomization of smells to faces, pilot study |
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Outline findings |
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Weaknesses |
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What is meant by the term halo-dumping, and how do the experiments explain the findings with this effect? |
The term ‘‘halo dumping’’ has been used to describe the observation that when participants (regardless of their level of expertise) are asked to evaluate the sensory qualities of an odor, they sometimes tend to use terms that refer to other sensory experiences (e.g., gustatory sensations) instead, such as ‘‘sweet’’ for a vanilla odourHowever, we believe this to be a highly unlikely explanation for the present data for a number of reasons. First, halo dumping has primarily been described in the domain of flavor perception. By contrast, people experience no such uncertainty when discriminating between olfactory and visual (food unrelated) information (i.e., odors and pictures of faces in the present study). What’s more, it is important to note that the participants in our study had to perform an odor detection task at the beginning of each trial, thus meaning that they were able to give separate responses, one to the stimulus presented in each modality (vision and olfaction).. Finally, it is also important to note that the dimension of ‘‘attractiveness’’ is a quite clear, natural, and easy characteristic to consider when we rate human faces. This means that it is unlikely that our participants had any doubts concerning which variable they were supposed to rate in the task. Taken together, we believe that these various considerations therefore preclude any kind of halo-dumping explanation of the present results. |