In an attempt to understand the effect of sounds on physiological measurements, along the positive (pleasant) negative (unpleasant) subjective dimension, 51 subjects (26 male) listened to 13 sounds in clips of 8s interspersed with 16s of silence while their heart rate, respiratory rate and skin conductance were measured and they recorded the subjective pleasantness of the sound. The sounds were...

It can be difficult to document effects of age-related olfactory loss on eating behavior. However, we have reported that elders, especially those with poor olfaction, were more willing to accept novel foods than were younger adults. It was also found that elderly subjects were more willing to accept foods with unpleasant odors than were young subjects. Because there is often confounding between...

According to economic theories, preference for one item over others reveals its rank value on a common scale. Previous studies identified brain regions encoding such values. Here we verify that these regions can valuate various categories of objects and further test whether they still express preferences when attention is diverted to another task. During functional neuroimaging, participants ra...

To determine the degree to which emotional changes in speech reflect factors other than arousal, such as valence, the authors used a computer game to induce natural emotional speech. Voice samples were elicited following game events that were either conducive or obstructive to the goal of winning and were accompanied by either pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Acoustic analysis of the speech recor...

Cross-culturally, fragrances are used to modulate body odor, but the psychology of fragrance choice has been largely overlooked. The prevalent view is that fragrances mask an individual's body odor and improve its pleasantness. In two experiments, we found positive effects of perfume on body odor perception. Importantly, however, this was modulated by significant interactions with individual od...

In the last few years the number of systems and devices that use voice based interaction as grown significantly. For a daily use of such systems the interaction must be always pleasantness in order to provide an optimal user experience. In this paper we present a new automatic voice pleasantness classification system based on prosodic and acoustic patterns of voice preference. The classificatio...

In three experiments the perceived roughness of visual and of auditory materials was investigated. In Experiment 1, the roughness of frequency-modulated tones was determined using a paired-comparison paradigm. It was found that using this paradigm similar results in comparison to literature were found. In Experiment 2, the perceived visual roughness of textures drawn from the CUReT database was...

Strong negative reactions, physical symptoms, and behavioral disruptions due to environmental odors are common in the adult population. We investigated relationships among such environmental chemosensory responsivity (CR), personality traits, affective states, and odor perception. Study 1 showed that CR and neuroticism were positively correlated in a sample of young adults (n = 101), suggesting...