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Psychosomatic Medicine 15:396-404 (1953)
© 1953 American Psychosomatic Society

The Role of Olfaction in Normal and Neurotic Behavior in Animals

Preliminary Report

JULES H. MASSERMAN M.D.1 and CURTIS PECHTEL Ph.D.1

1 Department of Nervous and Mental Diseases and the National Foundation for Psychiatric Research, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, Illinois. This study was supported by a special grant from Airkem, Inc., New York

The olfactory behavior of 14 monkeys was studied with regard to (1) spontaneous preferences, (2) associative responses to normal feeding, (3) motivationally conflictful experiences, which give rise to experimental neuroses, (4) effects in exacerbating or alleviating specific neurotic symptoms, and (5) the action of various deodorants. Our conclusions are:

An odor becomes relatively attractive when that odor (a) is spontaneously related to some satisfying experience, such as normal feeding, or (b) is experimentally linked with such satisfactions.

Olfactory stimuli are far less significant as determinants of behavior in normal monkeys than they are in animals made experimentally neurotic.

An odor becomes relatively unacceptable when it is associated with an unpleasant or motivationally conflictful experience, even when the latter is only of "psychologically" traumatic value and does not involve direct physiological injury.

Under such circumstances severe olfactory phobias can be engendered which may seriously impair general adaptive capacities and hinder the return of normal patterns of conduct.

Such aversive reactions generalize to related olfactory perceptions, and may become more intense and persistent than parallel reactions in other sensory modalities.

Bilateral lesions of the dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus in 15 cats produced amnesia for preoperatively learned normal and neurotic behavior, with greater impairment of olfactory responses than in those of any other modality. The operated animals showed a tendency to generalize certain intense olfactory experiences without discrimination and their capacity to perceive, remember, and react to olfactory signals was severely impaired.

Submitted on December 8, 1952






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Copyright © 1953 by the American Psychosomatic Society