Emily Chan
They also overgeneralize the emotions they experienced in regard to those events. This is called memory bias.
For example, they might think of the entirety of their college years negatively, even though they most likely had some individual positive memories associated with that time period.
Memory bias keeps people stuck in negative patterns of thinking. The trial aimed to disrupt those thought patterns.
Participants were asked to recall memories after either sniffing 24 different scent samples from glass jars or after hearing words that described the odors.
“In the verbal cue condition, 52 percent of memories were specific, while in the odor cue condition, 68 percent of memories were specific,” wrote the study authors. They found that the latter were “rated more arousing and vivid upon recall.”
In the future, scientists hope to run similar trials with the addition of brain scans. They want to see how the amygdala responds to scent therapy.
