Table 2 Summary of the most popular explanations that have been put forward to explain the crossmodal influence of olfaction on visual judgments of a person's facial attractiveness (and other attributes of person perception
From: The scent of attraction and the smell of success: crossmodal influences on person perception
Mood-induced changes | |
 People look better/worse when we are in a good/bad mood | |
Crossmodal affective priming | Demattè et al. (2007), Li et al. (2007) and Cook et al. (2015, 2018) |
 The valence associated with an olfactory prime can bias people's judgment of the attractiveness/likeability of a subsequently presented visual face | |
Crossmodal semantic priming | Hirsch (2006) |
 A familiar scent may be associated with someone of a certain age, and this form of semantic priming may bias judgments of a person's age | |
Crossmodal gender congruence | Capparuccini et al. (2010), Marinova and Moss (2014) and Risso et al. (2021) |
 The presentation of a gender-congruent (pleasant) fragrance may sometimes boost attractiveness, as a result of semantic priming and/or based on crossmodal correspondences | |
Halo-dumping | Demattè et al. (2007) |
 People may rate photos as more attractive in presence of pleasant olfactory stimulus only because they have no way to indicate what they think about the olfactory stimulus. (This account ultimately rejected.) | |
Olfactorily induced change in arousal | Bensafi et al. (2002), Hirsch (2006) and Risso et al. (2021) |
 Olfactory stimuli may influence a person's level of (sexual) arousal, and this, in turn, may influence their rating of other people | |