Odor intensity plays a very important role in various psychological experiments. The present paper studies on an emotional analysis of odors with an equivalent sensory intensity.
First, concentrations of fifteen odorants were determined so that their sensory intensities are equal to that of one percent concentration of amyl-acetate by a paired comparison method.
Next, a semantic-differential (SD) experiment was carried out employing twenty-five rating scales for these fifteen odorants with three male subjects. Applying the principal component analysis to the ratings, the factors of “Pleasantness-Unpleasantness” and “Coolness” were extracted as the first and the second principal components, respectively.
A pattern of scores calculated from the first and the second principal components correlated well with the results of the analysis on the waveforms of olfactory evoked potentials measured for the same subjects.
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