The Psychophysiological Effects of Touch and Odor

In everyday life, the emotional perception often occurred in different modalities at once but knowledge about multisensory perception on emotion was minimal. To understand emotional integration, odors and touch were used in two experiments. The first experiment was conducted to distinguish the emotional effects of different odors and to examine the effect of gender difference with respect to emotional perception. The aim of the second experiment was to determine the emotional integration of bimodal stimuli. The self-report and psychophysiological responses from forty-five participants were computed. Data were analyzed by two-way mixed ANOVA and two-way repeated measures ANOVA, statistical significance at the .05 level. The findings highlight that there was no crossed interaction between olfactory and tactile modalities in the aspect of emotion. The bimodal stimuli did not enhance the emotional perception of unimodal stimuli. Civet oil markedly elicited an unpleasantness. Michelia oil elicited objective arousal, meanwhile, Lavender oil elicited a pleasant feeling. In addition, 3 cm/s stroking touch elicited subjective pleasantness with moderate arousal, and 30 cm/s stroking touch elicited high arousal without the feeling of pleasantness. Moreover, men are more sensitive to some type of odor than women especially unpleasant odors and arousing odors. This was the first work that studied the bimodal emotional perception between olfactory and tactile modalities and was a first study that revealed the peripheral psychophysiological effect of CT afferents. A further study should investigate an impact of gender and culture to emotional integration and a consistency of finding.