Review of: Olfaction, Emotion and Associative Learning: Effects on Motivated Behavior

The purpose of this paper is to operationally define sadness and suggest a method for measuring it. Operationalization is the process of specifying how a concept will be defined and how it can be measured. Two key purposes of operational definitions are to make intangible ideas concrete and to make clear how you are going to measure the idea you want to test. Operational definitions allow for concepts to be more tangible, countable, and observable. One can measure sadness by scoring the level of sadness they are feeling and/or by measuring facial electromyography (EMG).

The name of this article is called, “Cognitive, Social and Psychological Determinants of Emotional State.” In 1962, Schachter and Singer put their two-factor theory of emotion to the test. Schachter and Singer believed that physical arousal played a huge role in emotions. They came up with one of the earliest cognitive theories of emotion. In the experiment, they provide three main hypotheses, which were derived from the aim of the study. The first one asks, if a person experiences a state of arousal for which they have no immediate

Often, one of the most overlooked of the five senses is the ability to smell. Living things use it every day- from figuring out what the best scent is to eat the most delicious food to figuring out what perfume makes us the happiest (and potentially, the most attractive to others). However, smell is more than just the stench someone gives off. In fact, odor can trigger a variety of emotions. To begin the discussion on the relationship between odor and emotion, one must define what an odor is. More than just a sense, smell consists of molecules that recognized by olfactory receptors and must have a specific concentration (Yantis, 2014). With much research, a relationship between memory and odor has existed and has led to broader findings about odor and other components. According to a 2009 study, a relationship between odor and mood exists (Croy et al., 2011). However, research done regarding odor and emotion is a fairly recent interest and has gained more attention over the last few years. According to the American Psychological Association, an emotion is a “complex pattern of changes, including physiological arousal, feelings, cognitive processes, and behavioral reactions, made in response to a situation perceived to be personally significant” (APA, n.d.).

Therefore, the fact that the depressed individuals’ sadness was already at an upper limit of measure while watching the neutral film did not impact the results (Rottenberg, 2005). The difference still remained significant, even after the depressed participants who had previously reported very high levels of sadness to the neutral film were removed from the data analysis (Rottenberg, 2005). Consequently, due to the lack of support for the hypothesis, Rottenberg questioned the results of his first study (Rottenberg, 2005). To answer his question, “were our results an anomaly?” (p. 168). In another test, He “sought to test the mood-facilitation hypothesis under conditions that were expected to favor its confirmation” (p. 168). However, despite his failure to prove the mood-facilitation hypothesis, his results otherwise suggest that “depression might actually blunt the distress and arousal that is typically associated with crying” (p.

Overall, results indicate that the manipulation of the color of questionnaire had no effect on mood. However, there was an effect of time of day on mood as well as an effect of gender on mood. The results did not support the main hypothesis that different colors would elicit different moods. Thus, this study found no support for the prediction that brighter colors would elicit positive moods, whereas less bright colors would elicit negative moods. These results do not support past research findings that brighter colors tend to elicit positive moods, whereas, dark colors elicit negative moods (Hemphill, 1996; Kaya & Epps, 2004). Moreover, this result was not expected given the previously discussed research by Weller and Livingston (1988)

According to Dictionary.com, motivation is an arousal of an organism that acts toward a desired goal. Emotion is the state of consciousness of what one experiences such as love, hate, happy and sad. Behavior is an action or reaction under certain circumstances. The relationship between the three is feelings that one receives under each. For instance, a cold rainy day, on such a day, one’s motivation may be to lie around all day and possibly not change out of their pajama’s, which could lead to a sad and depressive day, (emotions) which leads to an “I don’t care” behavior.

The testing environment for this experiment was an eight by 15 college classroom. The college classroom provided normal lighting (bright and clear) with a slightly higher temperature than normal room temperature. Inside the college classroom, there were 30 desks from the middle to the back of the room and at the front of the room was a large desk with a computer on top. There was a whiteboard on the front wall as well, with another computer and a printer on top of a desk to left corner of the room. There were three stimuli for this experiment, a list of 20 random words, a sheet of eight by 11 loose leaf paper and a two-page response sheet. The first stimulus was the list of 20 random words, which had 10 random words read out loud for each condition to all participants. The second stimulus was the sheet of eight by 11 loose leaf paper, which was used during the second condition of the experiment to write down the 10 random words they were read out loud to them. The last stimulus was the two-page response sheet, that already provided an identification

The results of the experiment does not support the hypothesis that odours can improve memory and increase perceived alertness in individuals as there appears to be no correlation. ylang ylang has been proven to have sedative and claming properties (Tisserand, 1993). Additionally, peppermint was shown to produce a significant improvement in the quality of memory when compared to the control and ylang ylang group (Moss et al., 2008). However, our results do not seem support past research done on such matters. Several confounding variables identified could be the reason for this incongruity. First, the way the odors were introduced into the room is done differently with past research and with this experiment. Moss et al. (2008) applied 4 drops of the odours to a diffuser pad for a “Tisserand Aroma-steam”. The Aroma-steam was placed under the bench in the testing cubicles and was switched on for 5 minutes prior to the participant entering the room. Ilmberger et al.

Claiming that odor is more powerful than music when remembering emotional memories, the team began an experiment involving odor, music, and lights. Women had to

biases being carried over from the previous condition, stress levels affecting the results). For this study, order effects are not significant. There are some concern regarding selection effects and external validity due to the sampling being nonrandom, thus the sample is not reasonably representative of the population of interest; some young adults are not college students and not all adults are in college. However, random assignment will occur to ensure, as much as possible, that there is no systematic difference in the kinds of individuals in each of the 4 conditions in the study and increase internal validity. There is still a concern about sample size however since 25 participants per condition may be rather small and limit internal validity. This study will be providing a script for the research assistants regarding what they should be saying to the participants and ensuring proper standardization such that the rooms the participants take the exam are in similar in look, size, and spacing and contain the appropriate condition-related material (e.g. a timer). The experiment will be a blind one for the subjects but due to the nature of independent variables and the script, it will not be double-blind (e.g. the experimenter will know what condition the subject is in). These confounds are important to control for because they can directly affect internal validity. The perceived time condition is the trickiest condition to ensure manipulation

The purpose of this experiment is to discover when people start to smell a certain scent. The question that is being investigated is how does the human nose recognize a specific smell and why people smell so many different scents. This question is important because it is a way to figure out the different odor thresholds. Odor threshold is the minimum amount of the scent needed in order for someone to recognize the smell in a room.

In the chosen profession of exercise science it is an important skill to adopt a certain approach to working with different clientele; this may be in many different clinical situations. For example sports scientists are now using the performance profile technique to help implement training programs for athletes. A study concerning the performance profile areas was undertaken in 1998 and examined the effect of altered mood states involving the areas of perceived need for an individual identified by the performance profile (Doyle and Parfitt, 1998). Similarly an experiment conducted during a tutorial was also designed specifically to find the connection between moods and perceived abilities/needs. By creating a mood induced state in participants through music, perceived abilities/needs were rated higher or lower depending on the mood.

To be able to evaluate the subject of cognitive psychology, I will be studying and testing both the emotion and memory of various subjects. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mental processes involved in learning, perception, memory, and reasoning. In this particular experiment, the main assessment is to examine the general areas of perception, thinking, and performance. Perception is the act or faculty of perceiving, or apprehending by means of the sense or of the mind; cognition; understanding. A better understanding of these factors will be obtained after studying and replicating the study of Dyer (1973) through the Stroop Effect.

For my topic I chose to talk about affective behaviors of humans and animals. I chose this topic because I thought it would be interesting to see why humans and animals act the way they do. During this paper we will look at multiple cases and other research about affective neuroscience in humans and animals. The outcome of this paper is for you as well as I to gain some insight on why we involuntary act the way we do.

The experiment consisted of three tasks. The first task differed based on the condition, where participant was asked to either passively look at the pictures, rate how the pictures are related to a similar set of pictures presented alongside the trial image, or to locate an action within the picture. In all cases, the participant viewed emotional images. The second task, a distracting task, consisted of calculating two simple math sums (e.g. 8-3) and deciding which one is larger. The last task was a recall of all trial pictures seen