The phenomenon of cross-modal association between sensory modalities can influence the perception of our environment. In cosmetic, smell and touch are intuitively the two most important senses involved in product perception and cross-modal associations between these two modalities have been explored. Thanks to our study, we have demonstrated that specific texture-fragrance associations lead to more or less congruent cross-modal pairing product. We want now to explore whether these different products can produce different emotional responses. We created combinations with 6 fragrances (floral, fruity, citrus, green, spicy and oriental) and 4 textures (cream, gel, oil and balm) to form so-called congruent or incongruent paring. While self-report is an easy and rapid measure of emotions, we also measured psychophysiological reactions as they can provide implicit or more objective responses of participants’ emotional experience. We try to answer the following question: How physiological and behavioral measurements allow us to get emotional information about cross-modal odor and texture perception? To do so, we recorded verbal responses; heart rate (HR), breathing rate (BR), skin conductance (SC) and facial expressions (FACS) of 29 participants during the evaluation of cosmetic fragrance-texture combinations at the laboratory. Our preliminary results have shown that smell-touch cross-modal interactions remain complex and that the relevance of psychophysiological parameters is dependent on the texture/fragrance pairing. Experimental evaluation at the laboratory can be far from the reality of cosmetic use and may bias verbal and/or behavioral responses. Thus, extend more ecologicaly the study with home product use phase and establishing the relationship between verbal and psychophysiological responses can be useful to better understand emotional user.
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