Virtual Reality Environments (VREs) are widely deployed in mental health treatments, often associated with relaxation techniques. The personalization of natural VR-based scenarios is a key element that can further facilitate users’ sense of presence and relaxation. This study explored the role of VREs’ personalization in the user experience with an environment supporting relaxation, by deploying mixed methods. Methods: A non-clinical sample of 20 individuals participated in exposure to a supportive body-scan-guided relaxation VRE. In the personalized conditions, the participants had the option of choosing the context (e.g., sea, mountain, or countryside) and including in the scenario different types of sounds, visual elements, and changing the time of day and weather. In the standard conditions, individuals were exposed to a relaxing VRE, but they could choose neither the context nor the auditory and visual elements. The order of presentation of the personalized vs non-personalized environments was randomized. Measures regarding relaxation, state-anxiety perceived levels, VRE-related symptoms, the usability of the Virtual Reality (VR) setting, sense of presence, pleasure, activation, engagement, and level of immersion experienced were collected before and after exposure to the VR environments. Results: Findings showed that personalized VREs were preferred by users. Participants generally preferred to experience a greater immersivity, pleasure, engagement, and relaxation in the personalized virtual settings. Conclusion: The study further confirms the role of personalization as a component positively contributing to relaxation and engagement. Future research may further assess this effect in the context of large-scale controlled studies involving clinical and non-clinical populations.

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), a condition also known as Chemical Sensitivity (CS), Chemical Intolerance (CI), Idiopathic Environmental Illness (IEI) and Toxicant Induced Loss of Tolerance (TILT), is an acquired multifactorial syndrome characterized by a recurrent set of debilitating symptoms. The symptoms of this controversial disorder are reported to be induced by environmental chemicals at doses far below those usually harmful to most persons. They involve a large spectrum of organ systems and typically disappear when the environmental chemicals are removed. However, no clear link has emerged among self-reported MCS symptoms and widely accepted objective measures of physiological dysfunction, and no clear dose-response relationship between exposure and symptom reactions has been observed. In addition, the underlying etiology and pathogenic processes of the disorder remain unknown and disputed, although biologic and psychologic hypotheses abound. It is currently debated whether MCS should be considered a clinical entity at all. Nevertheless, in the last few decades MCS has received considerable scientific and governmental attention in light of the many persons reporting this illness. In this review, we provide a general overview of the history, definition, demographics, prevalence, and etiologic challenges in defining and understanding MCS.

In this study we examined the development of wine expertise. We asked four groups—untrained wine drinkers, second- and third-level trainee sommeliers, and professional sommeliers—to engage in a range of olfactory tasks to assess perceptual and semantic aspects of expertise. These tasks included identification, recognition, and description of a range of domain-specific and common odour stimuli, including wines. Trainee sommeliers were significantly poorer at identification of wine-relevant odours than untrained wine drinkers and professional sommeliers. Trainee and professional sommeliers were, however, significantly better than untrained wine drinkers in a delayed matching-to-sample wine-recognition task, but not in the case of other odorous stimuli. The wine-description task demonstrated a degree of skill, in terms of specificity and quantity of wine-relevant descriptors, as a function of expertise. These results, of one of the first studies of examining wine expertise by a cross-sectional developmental approach, indicate that perceptual aspects of expertise are probably rapidly acquired, being present even in the second-and third-level trainees, while semantic expertise is slower to develop, and may incur time for the identification of wine-specific odorants during training.

Odors are powerful in bringing back old and vivid memories bearing emotional content. This inherent hedonic property of olfactory stimuli makes this sensory modality particularly suitable for studying autobiographical memory. In the present work, adolescents (first experiment), young adults (second experiment), and elderly (third experiment) of both sexes were asked to smell 10 familiar odorants and to report if these odorants evoked personal autobiographical memories or referential memories (i.e., names and objects). The participants were then required to link these memories to triplets of words using the progressive elaboration method of the Loci mnemonic. The aim of the study was to investigate whether 1) odorants evoking autobiographical memories led to faster reaction times (RTs) and to a greater number of correct responses in the recall of the items associated to such memories than do odorants evoking referential memories, 2) females differed from males on the above tasks along with the life span, and 3) the preferential codes (i.e., autobiographical or referential) attributed to the odorants vary according to gender and age. In general, it was observed that the way in which the odorants were encoded affected the subsequent retrieval. Indeed, data analyses have shown that odorants evoking autobiographical memories lead to faster RTs (experiments 2 and 3) and that females outperform males (experiments 1 and 2). However, these effects are greatly age and gender dependent. Furthermore, females are more prone than males to code the odorants autobiographically (as shown by the higher amount of autobiographical experiences that they have provided at all ages relative to males). Results are discussed in terms of developmental differences and odor-emotion links and the possible role of odors and autobiographical memory in learning and retrieval of other items.

Introduction: Parkinson’s disease often first presents with asymmetric motor symptoms. A number of studies have now established that sensory deficits can also be similarly asymmetric. It is well established that Parkinson’s disease is associated with marked olfactory dysfunction, but whether this too present assymetrically is a currently contentious question. Methods: To address this, we recruited 12 early stage Parkinson patients with right-sided motor symptoms and compared them to 12 healthy age-matched controls on tests of olfactory identification and recogniton administered separately to each nostril. Results: Data analyses indicated that Parkinson patients performed worse with the left nostril on both tasks, while no nostril-related differences were observed for the healthy age-matched control group on the same comparisons. Conclusions: These findings support the idea that asymmetric deficits do extend into olfactory performance in Parkinson’s disease - as they do into other sensory domains - and we examine the possibility that they might be a particular feature of right-sided motor symptom presentation.