Smell and Emotion: The Deep Thoughts of Rachel Herz
Who needs AI slop when you can have genuine slop?
Image: With apologies to Jack Handey and SNL
The current crisis in academic publishing is driven by AI. With the use of a few prompts any idiot can create, collect, and analyze data, after which the AI will write a manuscript that the “author” can submit to a scientific journal. The end product need not be intellectually significant or even coherent—at best, it mimics the form of scientific communication without contributing much value. At worst, it contains untrustworthy or fabricated results and a reference list contaminated by misleading or hallucinated citations. Yet this stream of ersatz submissions must be reviewed by actual, human scientists at some cost of time and effort. The result? Overburdened reviewers wave through a lot of substandard work along with an increasing amount of fabricated dreck.
The term AI slop aptly describes the analogous situation on social media, which is awash in bogus text and images. Scientific AI slop lowers the overall quality of the entire enterprise. The result is that actual researchers can publish papers they actually wrote that, by the standards of even a few years ago, are poorly conceived, feebly presented, and a waste of the reader’s time. It’s what I call genuine slop.
I share these thoughts for two reasons. First, I recently reviewed a smell-related paper for a long-established and well-regarded journal. The paper, by researchers I’d never heard of, from a university I’d never heard of, involved a lot of data processing and modeling. Okay, fine. But the goal of the manipulations wasn’t clear and there were no references for the software used. Also, the end results made little sense but were presented in smooth and often grandiose prose. Something was off. I checked the references and found many that were incorrect, misleading, or outright garbage. I spent a day and a half detailing the errors, and told the editor the paper was AI slop. Months went by and eventually the editor rejected the paper. Not with a bland “thank you for submitting, better luck next time” rejection, but with a “fuck you and fuck the horse you rode in on” rejection. Quite satisfying.
The second reason is that I just read a paper by Rachel Herz with the provocative title “Smell is emotion.” Dr. Herz is a real person: I’ve met her. She has published books on smell and taste. She is employed in some capacity by Brown University which, although an undergraduate refuge for the less bright children of celebrities, is nonetheless a real university. Here is how Herz begins her paper:
Haynes-LaMotte points out in his proposition for a new comprehensive framework of emotion that there is currently no generally accepted consensus on how “affect” or its outputs are defined, in spite of the topic engendering a very large corpus of interdisciplinary research and clinical sciences. Building on Haynes-LaMotte’s comment, I believe that a general underlying conceptual framework for affect has great utility, but it is also the case that granular perspectives offer insights and opportunities that propel empirical and theoretical development in novel directions. In this perspective article I aim to define how various facets of affect are represented and experienced through the lens of olfaction to aid in the evolution of affective science.
Did you throw up in your mouth a little bit when you read that? It’s okay. I did too. Let’s explore why.
You’ve never heard of Haynes-Lamotte? Few have, outside of his immediate family.1 He’s not a Famous Emotion Theorist as you might have deduced from Herz tagging him in the opening sentence. Pro tip: don’t baffle your readers in the first sentence.
his proposition for a new comprehensive framework of emotion
Is she getting paid by the syllable? How about “his new take on emotion theory”?
no generally accepted consensus
Redundancy much?
the topic engendering a very large corpus
This engenders the image of a chihuahua attempting to mate with a Saint Bernard.
a general underlying conceptual framework for affect has great utility
“Da, comrade, the general underlying conceptual framework has great utility for upcoming planning session of crop yield forecast subcommittee for People’s Party Congress.”
granular perspectives offer insights and opportunities
Maybe it’s just me, but a granular perspective is when I look for the sand in my swim trunks.
propel empirical and theoretical development in novel directions
What work does “in novel directions” do here?
In this perspective article I aim to define
“Here, I define” would save a lot of breath.
facets of affect
Quite poetical. The facets of affect / like the birth of mirth / are bangers of anger / that cover the earth.
experienced through the lens of olfaction
OMFG is every academic required to use the “through the lens of” trope? Basta!
Clearly, vurping is the normal response to Herz’s lead-off paragraph. What about the rest of the paper? Well, the overblown rhetoric persists. The argument, as far as I could determine between bouts of suppressing my gag reflex, is that smell processing areas in the human brain are closely linked to emotional processing areas; that odor perceptions run the gamut from vague to highly specific—just like emotions!; that odors lead to approach/avoid behaviors—just like emotions! “In sum, the sense of smell and emotional experience are fundamentally interconnected, bi-directional, and functionally equivalent,” says Herz, citing two publications by, uh, Herz.
In the section on mood, Herz goes on a long rant about aromatherapy. There are no effects of aromatherapy oils as such, you see, only effects of verbal cues. Bam! Another giant straw man struck down. But she’s only getting warmed up.
Herz takes the strong position that one’s emotional response to a particular smell is entirely the result of learned associations, a claim that would make B.F. Skinner blush. Where is the evidence? Are there thousands of people who hate rose oil because of childhood trauma? Where are the people who love the smell of shit because they stepped in some while visiting Disneyland? How does she account for consistent emotional responses across people to a smell they have never experienced before? [Forget it, she’s rolling.—Ed.]
To read the whole paper is liking eating an entire bag of potato chips at one sitting. You feel greasy, queasy, and somewhat ashamed of yourself for having done it.
“You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed”
Talking Heads, Psychokiller
Rachel S. Herz, Smell is emotion. Brain Sciences 16:59, 2026.
Adam D. Haynes-Lamotte, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with a practice near Seattle. He has published papers on specific topics of interest to psychotherapists, but the paper Herz cites is what the trade magazines used to call a “think piece.”