In real-life situations, emotional information is often expressed through multiple sensory channels, with cross-talk between channels. Previous research has established that odor environments regulate the recognition of facial expressions. Therefore, this study combined event-related potentials ERPs with a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the effect of food odor context on the recognition of facial expressions and its time course. Fifty-four participants were asked to identify happy, fearful, and neutral faces in an odor context pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Behaviorally, unpleasant food odors triggered faster recognition of facial expressions, especially fearful ones. ERP results found that in the early stage, unpleasant food odors within 80— ms evoked a larger P amplitude than pleasant food odors and no odors, which showed that the unpleasant odor environment promoted the rapid processing of facial expressions.

The most notable research into the topic came from psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered research into emotion recognition in the s. His team of researchers provided their test subjects with photos of faces showing different emotional expressions. The test subjects then had to define the emotional states they saw in each photo, based on a predetermined list of possible emotions they had seen prior. Through these studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of Western and Eastern cultures when it came to selecting emotional labels that corresponded with facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating happiness, disgust, anger, sadness , surprise and fear. Working with his long-time friend Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman found that the findings of the study correlated with Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media.

The recognition of emotional facial expressions is a central aspect for an effective interpersonal communication. Our results confirmed that happiness is the best recognized emotion during preadolescence. However, a significant decrease in recognition accuracy across age emerged for fear expressions. Moreover, participants' affective reactions elicited by the vision of happy facial expressions resulted to be the most pleasant and arousing compared to the other emotional expressions.

In real-life situations, emotional information is often expressed through multiple sensory channels, with cross-talk between channels. Previous research has established that odor environments regulate the recognition of facial expressions. Therefore, this study combined event-related potentials ERPs with a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the effect of food odor context on the recognition of facial expressions and its time course. Fifty-four participants were asked to identify happy, fearful, and neutral faces in an odor context pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.