Abstrakt
A body of research predominantly in young adults has suggested a link between olfactory perception, especially sensitivity, and personality characteristics, particularly Neuroticism. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether these associations are present outside this particular age range and whether they involve other olfactory abilities.
Also, implicit in such investigations is the assumption of the relative stability of such links, in which case they should already be found in young children and involve general, constitutionally based differences in reactivity and self-regulation, that is, temperament. On the one hand, extrapolating from studies with adults to children, those scoring high on Negative Affectivity, which broadly maps onto Neuroticism, should outperform the low-scoring ones.
On the other hand, well-developed self-regulatory processes referred to as Effortful Control, which modulate the expression of such tendencies and manifest themselves in the ability to voluntarily sustain focus on a task, shift attention from one task to another, initiate action and inhibit it, might also contribute to better olfactory performance. Thus, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the temperamental factors on olfactory performance.
Odor identification and discrimination in 143 children (72 boys) aged six to eight years were assessed with the Sniffin' Sticks, controlling for their verbal fluency. Parents provided reports of their children's temperament by means of the short form of the Children's Behavior Questionnaire.
The potential influence of parental responsiveness and demands on temperamental attributions were controlled for with hypothetical vignettes representing parenting styles. There was an effect of Effortful Control (but not Negative Affectivity) on the total identification (but not discrimination) scores.
Namely, children who were perceived as more capable of self-regulation exhibited higher odor identification scores.