The Observatories

Friday – Memory Instinct – ‘Funeral Home’ (room 2)

This is a commercial fragrance made to simulate the musty, floral smell of a funeral home. After testing out the scents of Playdoh, Grass, Rain, Bonfires and other on a sample group, it was decided that ‘Funeral Home’ created the greatest negative memory response. The scent also contains muguet (Lily of the Valley) which has been shown to increase attention to stimulus (Warm et al., 1991). Thus, we were expecting people to feel repelled by this room.

Result
‘Funeral Home’ increased the ‘sad’ response five times more than any other scent. It was also marked as the least positive room after the vanilla day. Overall a good and predicted response!

Funeral Home was also used in the Dana Centre and the Science Communication Conference experiments in 2010.