Emotion elicitation by odors and their influence on behavior and cognitive performance

Because of technical constraints associated to odor delivery, odor-borne emotions have often been understudied in comparison to other sensory modalities. The understanding of these emotions and their links with other cognitive processes remains at a nascent stage, in spite of the strong affective power of smells. This work aims at decoding the complex mesh of odor-born feelings and their underlying mechanisms at the behavioral, physiological and neural level in humans. In particular, this manuscript presents three studies; one of them describes the representation of complex odor-specific emotions in the brain, beyond odor pleasantness only. The second study assesses the influence of endogenous attentional modulation on the neural processing of odor valence. The third evaluates the influence of an affective olfactory context on learning processes at the behavioral and psychophysiological levels. The manuscript also includes the description of a new MRI-compatible olfactometer that was implemented during this doctorate work.