Smelling the unwashed clothing of a loved one when separated is at the same time little known but widely practiced (McBurney et al., 2006). A majority of persons surveyed reported that they did it to remember an absent romantic partner and because it smells good; additionally, it made them feel happy and comfortable. Shoup et al. (2008) found that such olfactory comfort behavior extended to relatives as a function of degree of relatedness. In both American and German subjects, olfactory comfort correlated with adult attachment style: positively with Secure attachment, and negatively with Dismissive attachment. Number of personal photos displayed in a student’s dorm room correlated with olfactory comfort behavior and showed the same relationships with attachment. Streeter (2008) experimentally demonstrated the role of olfactory comfort by having subjects smell various T-shirts after experiencing a stressor. Smelling a partner’s T-shirt increased comfort, and reduced anxiety and negative affect. The smell of an unknown individual also reduced anxiety and negative affect, but did not influence comfort. Those with Secure attachment showed greater reduction in anxiety than those with other attachment styles. Euler (unpublished) found that smelling of clothing correlated positively with the love styles (Lee, 1973) mania, agape, and eros. In this contribution we review these findings and suggest that they indicate a system of olfactory comfort that relates to Harlow’s contact comfort (e.g, Harlow, Harlow, & Suomi, 1971) as well as Bowlby’s (1969) theory of attachment as extended to adult romantic attachment (Hazan & Shaver, 1987).
2023. Capital de movilidad y migraciones intraeuropeas. Jóvenes españoles en Düsseldorf (Alemania). Revista Internacional de Sociología 81:2 ► pp. e229 ff.
Spence, Charles
2021. The scent of attraction and the smell of success: crossmodal influences on person perception. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 6:1
Schaal, Benoist, Tamsin K. Saxton, Hélène Loos, Robert Soussignan & Karine Durand
2020. Olfaction scaffolds the developing human from neonate to adolescent and beyond. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375:1800 ► pp. 20190261 ff.
Schaal, Benoist & Joël Candau
2019. L’olfactilité sociale des humains : la science fluctuante d’un sens omniprésent. In À vue de nez, ► pp. 49 ff.
Lai, Mei-Kei
2015. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Design of Communication, ► pp. 1 ff.
Lai, Mei-Kei
2017. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Digital Arts, ► pp. 141 ff.
Lai, Mei-Kei
2018. The Art of Digital Scent - People, Space and Time. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts 10:1 ► pp. 2 ff.
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