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Temperamental Influences on Children’s Olfactory Performance: the Role of Self-Regulation

  • Published:
Chemosensory Perception

Abstract

Introduction

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, such as odor identification and discrimination, and temperamental differences in reactivity and self-regulation. On the one hand, extrapolating from studies with adults to children, participants 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, might also contribute to better olfactory performance.

Aim

Thus, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of the temperamental factors on olfactory performance. Namely, we hypothesized that superior olfactory performance would be delivered by children scoring relatively higher on negative affectivity but also by those perceived as exhibiting greater self-regulation.

Methods

Odor identification and discrimination in 143 children (72 boys) aged 6 to 8 years were assessed with the Sniffin‘ Sticks, controlling for verbal fluency. Parents provided reports of their children‘s temperament by means of a short form of the Children‘s Behavior Questionnaire. The potential influence of parental responsiveness and demands on temperamental attributions was controlled for with hypothetical vignettes representing parenting styles.

Results

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. Girls did not outperform boys on either of the olfactory tests, but they were deemed by their parents to show greater self-regulation.

Conclusion

Our findings indirectly point to the effect of self-regulatory tendencies on odor identification in young children. However, they did not corroborate the idea that children varying in negative affectivity (underlying neuroticism) differ in terms of olfactory performance. Given the narrow age range of children recruited in the present study, further studies with preadolescent and adolescent participants are needed to gain more insight into the nature of these relationships.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Jitka Lindová and Jan Havlíček for providing them with the back translation of the Children’s Behavior Questionnaire. We are very grateful to children and their parents for their participation, and school principals and teachers for allowing us to perform the study in school premises. We would also like to thank the three reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, U Kříže 8, 158 00, Jinonice, Prague 5, Czech Republic

    Lenka Martinec Nováková & Radka Vojtušová Mrzílková

  2. National Institute of Mental Health, Topolová 748, 250 67, Klecany, Czech Republic

    Lenka Martinec Nováková

  3. Department of Zoology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Viničná 7, 128 00, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Lenka Martinec Nováková

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  1. Lenka Martinec Nováková
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Correspondence to Lenka Martinec Nováková.

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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008 (5). The study was approved by the IRB of the Charles University, Faculty of Science (Approval Number 2015/11). Written informed consent was obtained from the children’s parents and oral informed consent was provided by the children in the presence of a teacher employed by the school. The children-parents pairs each received 300 CZK (approximately 11 EUR or 12 USD) in compensation.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This study is a result of research funded by the project LO1611 with financial support from the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports (MEYS) under the NPU I program and, further, by PRVOUK program (Programy rozvoje vědních oblastí na Univerzitě Karlově v Praze) P20 at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University within the Institutional Support for Long-Term Development of Research Organizations from MEYS. It was also funded as part of the Specific Academic Research project (SVV) 2016 number 260 348 (“Adaptivní mechanismy v lidské psychice”) realized at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. LMN was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GA14-02290S) and Charles University Research Centre “Příroda a kultura, interakce kulturní a biologické evoluce v mezioborové perspektivě” (UNCE 204004) realized at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University.

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Martinec Nováková, L., Vojtušová Mrzílková, R. Temperamental Influences on Children’s Olfactory Performance: the Role of Self-Regulation. Chem. Percept. 9, 153–173 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12078-016-9216-0

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