BACKGROUND Patients with Panic Disorder (PD) direct their attention towards potential threat, followed by panic attacks, and increased sweat production. Onés own anxiety sweat odor influences the attentional focus, and discrimination of threat or non-threat. Since olfactory projection areas overlap with neuronal areas of a panic-specific fear network, the present study investigated the neuronal...

Fragrances, such as plant odors, have been shown to evoke autonomic response patterns associated with Ekman's (Ekman et al., 1983) basic emotions happiness, surprise, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust. Inducing positive emotions by odors in highly frequented public spaces could serve to improve the quality of life in urban environments. Thus, the present study evaluated the potency of ambient o...

Mothers are attracted by infant cues of a variety of different modalities. To clarify the possible neural mechanisms underlying maternal attraction to infant odor cues, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during odor detection tasks in which 19 mothers and 19 nulliparous females (nonmothers) were presented with infant or adult male odors. They were ins...

Evaluative conditioning is a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which the “CR” is a change in preference or liking for the “CS.” It is probably a major cause of development of likes and dislikes in humans. This research introduces a new, cross-modal evaluative conditioning procedure using odors as USs and photographs of people’s faces as CSs. When liked, neutral, and disliked odors that were pla...

This paper provides evidence of substantial individual differences in the affective importance of odors, and offers initial validation for an eight-item scale of the impact of odor (AIO) on liking for people, places, foods and cosmetic/health products. In study 1, 116 American college students and 336 Flemish Belgian college students completed the AIO along with other measures of reactions to o...

Visual and auditory stimuli of high social and ecological importance are processed in the brain by specialized neuronal networks. To date, this has not been demonstrated for olfactory stimuli. By means of positron emission tomography, we sought to elucidate the neuronal substrates behind body odor perception to answer the question of whether the central processing of body odors differs from per...

The 2008 crisis highlighted the linkages between the financial sector and the real economy, as well as between the corresponding stabilization policies: macroprudential and monetary (M&Ms). Our game-theoretic analysis focuses on the increasingly adopted separation setup, in which M&Ms are conducted by two different institutions (e.g. in Australia, Canada, Eurozone, Sweden, Switzerland and the U...