アロマテラピーにおける嗜好性と自律神経活動について

抄録

In this paper, we examined to reveal the relationship between aromatherapy and automatic nerve activity quantitatively. Tanita reported that parasympathetic activity becomes dominant in subjects who like its fragrance and sympathetic activity becomes dominant in subjects who don't like its fragrance. However, those subjects were only female. Therefore, our purpose is to verify for whether men can achieve the same results as women and to considerate correlation between subjective evaluation by SD method and objective evaluation by LF/HF. In this experiment, we measured LF/HF for 5 minutes each in rest state and fragrance inhalation state, we measured the change in emotions before and after the experiment,and we evaluate preference of the essential oil. As a result, we obtain a tendency that parasympathetic activity becomes dominant in subjects who like its fragrance and sympathetic activity becomes dominant in subjects who don't like its fragrance, same as Tanita's report. Therefore it is clear that there is no gender difference in the autonomic nervous activity. Furthermore, changes in autonomic nervous activity and emotions changes are consistent.