That odors and olfactory memories are charged with potent emotion is an article of faith among scent marketers and a certain segment of psychological researchers. The former claim that emotion is a powerful driver in creating brand preference, while conveniently ignoring the flip side of the coin: “Eww, that laundry detergent smells just like Aunt Edna!” The latter cite the anatomical link between nose and limbic system as the reason smell memories are so evocative. This despite the weak and inconsistent evidence regarding the emotionality of smell-induced autobiographical memory.
The sacred text of the smell-emotion-memory crowd is the madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. It is their touchstone for believing that odor memories are permanent, unchangeable, and suffused with emotion. It is their scriptural basis for proclaiming Proust the first prophet to reveal these truths.
In reality, the Proust Boosters are wrong on scientific and literary grounds. Smell memory is just as malleable and no more emotional than other forms of memory, and Proust was not the first to write about the evocativeness of smell.
In What the Nose Knows, I observed that
the memory-evoking power of smell was a commonplace observation long before Swann’s Way. Sixty-nine years earlier, for example, Edgar Allan Poe wrote “I believe that odors have an altogether idiosyncratic force, in affecting us through association; a force differing essentially from that of objects addressing the touch, the taste, the sight, or the hearing.”
Poe recognized that smells are excellent cues to memory, but he didn’t get all gooey about how emooootional they are. Poe was the quintessential Goth, not a douchebag emo.
Now joining Team Emo is an Iranian research group that references smell in a paper hilariously titled “Emo-sensory communication, emo-sensory intelligence and gender.”
They’re late to the game, but they have spirit.
Let’s go, E-mos!
Ayatollah Ayatollah Oi Oi Oi!
Sadly, there is more bad news for Team Emo. A new paper in Acta Psychologica lays it out right in the title: “Odor associated memories are not necessarily highly emotional.”
Stay Goth, my friends.
Elham Naji Meidani, Hossein Makiabadi, Mohammad Zabetipour, Hannaneh Abbasnejad, Aida Firoozian Pooresfehani, and Shaghayegh Shayesteh. (2022). Emo-sensory communication, emo-sensory intelligence and gender. Journal of Business, Communication & Technology, 1:54-66.
Luisa Bogenschütz, Christina Bermeitinger, Anna Brörken, Helge Schlüter, and Ryan P.M. Hackländer. 2022. Odor associated memories are not necessarily highly emotional. Acta Psychologica 230:103767.