Smell Your Way to Better Grades

Overview

Objectives/Goals This project was to determine which of the five scents, lavender, vanilla, white musk, lavender, and citrus, would help males and females remember the most amount of words. Methods/Materials The subjects were put in a room and given a test of 25 words. No scent was present in this test, this test was the baseline to which all the other tests were compared to. The subjects were given two minutes to study the words, then another two minutes to write down all the words they could remember. When the tests were taken with scents, a jar of the scented oil (either lavender, vanilla, white musk, lavender, or citrus) was put in the middle of the room, and an absorbant fragrance pad was dipped into it and passed around. The scent would be present during both study and recall. Results The females responed to nearly all the scents in a positive way. The only scent that lowered the amount of words they could recall was the citrus scent. The three scents that helped the most were the white musk, vanilla, and lavender scent. The lavender scent improved their scores by 43.7%. The males, however, were the opposite: they did best on the baseline test, the test where no test was present. The scents that decreased their score the most were the white musk, citrus, and lavender scents. The scent that decreased their score most significantly was the white musk scent: they remembered 50.1% less words. Conclusions/Discussion The females responded positively to most of the scents that were used, except the citrus. The males responded negatively to all the scents used, including the citrus. The citrus scent appears to have a negative affect on both males and females. Perhaps if different,less feminine, scents had been used, the males would have performed better. I do not believe that males respond negatively to all scents, i think it had to do with which scents were used. To expand on this project i would use more scents to find one that males respond to in a positive way. I would also use different age groups.

Competition history

• CSEF 2005 Behavioral Sciences · Entry S0301

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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