ESN-funded study just published in Food Quality and Preference

Peeking through the door at a meeting room at the Clayton Hotel Ballsbridge in Dublin, you would have seen a group of ...

... sensory scientists passing around a perfume. Christelle Porcherot invited fellow scientists to sniff at a glass flacon. It seemed that whoever got a whiff of the perfume became excited and lit up with a smile. This happened in October 2018 during one of the meetings of the European Sensory Network.


The ESN research team had decided after the previous meeting in Amsterdam in April to conduct a study that would address a couple of questions ESN members had been pondering for a while. The Amsterdam meeting was dedicated to the topic of implicit methods in sensory and consumer research.

“The implicit is often referred to as the hidden part of the iceberg; it is there somewhere, but it remains invisible and is often overlooked. We wanted to plunge into the depths in order to discover the hidden face of the iceberg”, remembers Claire Sulmont-Rossé, ESN chair.

Prof. Adriaan Spruyt from Ghent University and Dr. Alexandra Kraus from ESN member isi Göttingen, two experts in the field of implicit methods, were invited to give a talk at the ESN meeting in Amsterdam. With eight more speakers from ESN member organisations and three demonstrations of implicit methods, the workshop offered the opportunity to get a thorough, up-to-date and critical view of the topic.

Measuring the implicit

The presentations and the ensuing discussions led to the design of the ESN perfume study. Part of the study was conducted during an ESN workshop at the Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium in Edinburgh in 2019. Perhaps you were among the participants and sniffed at the two perfumes, Nomade and Pop.

The workshop and the study aimed at exploring different implicit methods for measuring emotions elicited by fragrances and at investigating the role of context.

The results of the research have just been published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

Congratulation to the research team: Christelle Porcherot, Sophie Raviot-Derrien, Marie-Pierre Beague, SvenHenneberg, Michelle Niedziela, Kathry Ambroze and Jean A.McEwan

"Effect of context on fine fragrance-elicited emotions: Comparison of three experimental methodologies" Food Quality and Preference Volume 95, January 2022, 104342 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950329321002251?via%3Dihub