17:00 - 18:00
Tue-P
Room: Foyer Conde De Cantanhede
The Social Odor Scale (SOS): development and initial validation of a new scale for the assessment of social odor awareness
Poster presentation
Elisa Dal Bò 1, 2, Claudio Gentili 1, 2, Florian Ph.S Fischmeister 3, 4, Cinzia Cecchetto 2
1 Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC), University of Padua, Padua, Italy, 2 Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy, 3 Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria, 4 Department of Biomedical Imaging and Image-Guided Therapy, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
The degree of attention individuals pay to olfactory cues (called odor awareness) influences the role of odors in everyday life. Particularly, odors produced by the human body (i.e., social odors) are able to carry a wide variety of information and to elicit a broad spectrum of emotional reactions, making them essential in interpersonal relationships. Hence, despite the assessment of awareness toward social odors is crucial, a proper tool is still lacking. Here, we designed and initially validated the Social Odor Scale (SOS), a 12-item scale designed to measure the individual differences in awareness towards different social odors. In Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis suggests that the three factors structure was the model that best fit with the Italian version of the scale. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supports a second-order model with one higher-order factor representing social odor awareness in general and three lower-order factors representing familiar, romantic partner, and stranger social odors. The final version of the scale presented a good fit. In Study 2, CFA was performed in the German version of the scale confirming the validity of scale structure. Study 3 and 4 revealed that SOS total score and its subscales were positively correlated with other validated olfactory scales, but not with olfactory abilities. Moreover, SOS was found to reflect the inter-individual variability that characterizes social odor processing: SOS was related to the gender and reproductive state of the participants. Overall, the results indicated that SOS is a valid and reliable instrument to assess awareness toward social odors in everyday life.