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Global study of social odor awareness
University of Wroclaw Institute of Psychology, Wroclaw, Poland..
University of Wroclaw Institute of Psychology, Wroclaw, Poland..
University of Wroclaw Institute of Psychology, Wroclaw, Poland..
University of Wroclaw Institute of Psychology, Wroclaw, Poland..
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2018 (English)In: Chemical Senses, ISSN 0379-864X, E-ISSN 1464-3553, Vol. 43, no 7, p. 503-513Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or hedonic preferences across the globe, the aspects of a given culture as well as culturally universal individual differences affecting odor awareness in human social life remain unknown. Here, we conducted a large-scale analysis of data collected from 10,794 participants from 52 study sites from 44 countries all over the world. The aim of our research was to explore the potential individual and country-level correlates of odor awareness in the social context. The results show that the individual characteristics were more strongly related than country-level factors to self-reported odor awareness in different social contexts. A model including individual-level predictors (gender, age, material situation, education and preferred social distance) provided a relatively good fit to the data, but adding country-level predictors (Human Development Index, population density and average temperature) did not improve model parameters. Although there were some cross-cultural differences in social odor awareness, the main differentiating role was played by the individual differences. This suggests that people living in different cultures and different climate conditions may still share some similar patterns of odor awareness if they share other individual-level characteristics.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018. Vol. 43, no 7, p. 503-513
Keywords [en]
odor awareness, olfaction, smell, culture
National Category
Psychology
Research subject
SOCIAL SCIENCE, Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-12645DOI: 10.1093/chemse/bjy038ISI: 000442930300311PubMedID: 29955865Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85055280666OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hv-12645DiVA, id: diva2:1230593
Note

Published: 27 June 2018

Funders: Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, IP2014 043773; Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University,  (RG-1439-012); Estonian Ministry of Education of Science,  (IUT2-13); Ministry of Education and Science, 01201370995

Available from: 2018-07-04 Created: 2018-07-04 Last updated: 2019-12-12Bibliographically approved

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Sorbring, Emma

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