Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway.

The world is undergoing massive atmospheric and ecological change, driving unprecedented challenges to human well-being. Olfaction is a key sensory system through which these impacts occur. The sense of smell influences quality of and satisfaction with life, emotion, emotion regulation, cognitive function, social interactions, dietary choices, stress, and depressive symptoms. Exposures via the olfactory pathway can also lead to (anti-)inflammatory outcomes. Increased understanding is needed regarding the ways in which odorants generated by nature (i.e., natural olfactory environments) affect human well-being. With perspectives from a range of health, social, and natural sciences, we provide an overview of this unique sensory system, four consensus statements regarding olfaction and the environment, and a conceptual framework that integrates the olfactory pathway into an understanding of the effects of natural environments on human well-being. We then discuss how this framework can contribute to better accounting of the impacts of policy and land-use decision-making on natural olfactory environments and, in turn, on planetary health.

Oxidative Stress and Lipid Peroxidation in NAFLD with and without Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.

OBJECTIVE: To compare superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD 1) and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels along with biochemical parameters in patients of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) with and without Type 2 diabetes mellitus. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional comparative study. Place and Duration of the Study: Centre for Research in Experimental and Applied Medicine, AMC, in collaboration with the Department of Radiology, Combined Military Hospital, Rawalpindi, from February to November 2022. METHODOLOGY: Two hundred and ten patients were selected by non-probability purposive sampling and divided into 3 groups. Healthy individuals were labelled as Group Ι, Group II included patients of NAFLD without diabetes mellitus, and Group III had patients of NAFLD with diabetes mellitus. Fasting blood glucose levels and lipid profile were measured. ELISA (enzyme-linked immunoassay) was done for the assessment of SOD 1 and MDA levels. The data was analysed by version 22.0 of SPSS and expressed in mean ± SD and percentage. One-way ANOVA was done for all groups and grade comparison was followed by the post-hoc Tukey test. RESULTS: When compared to control groups, the mean SOD 1 level in diseased groups was significantly lower (p<0.001). There was a statistically significant difference between each group (p<0.001). Mean levels of MDA were significantly increased in diseased groups as compared to controls with a statistically significant difference between all groups except between Group II and III. CONCLUSION: In patients having NAFLD with and without diabetes mellitus, SOD 1 levels were considerably lower compared to controls whereas MDA levels were significantly higher. This decrease in SOD 1 and raise in MDA levels was indicative of increased oxidative stress in patients and can be viewed as a biomarker for oxidative stress. KEY WORDS: NAFLD, ELISA, Oxidative stress, SOD 1, MDA, Lipid peroxidation.

Conceptual Foundations of Sustainability.

Threats to the health of our environment are numerous. Much research in science and engineering is devoted to documenting, understanding, and attempting to mitigate the harm itself. The root challenge for sustainability, however, is human behavior. As such, changes to human behaviors and the internal processes that drive them are also essential. Critical to understanding sustainability-related behaviors is the individual's conceptualization of the natural world and its components and processes. The papers in this topiCS issue address these conceptualizations by drawing from anthropological, linguistic, educational, philosophical, and social cognitive perspectives as well as traditional psychological approaches to the study of concepts and their development in children. They engage with many domains bearing on environmental sustainability including climate change, biodiversity, land and water conservation, resource use, and design of the built environment. They coalesce around four broad themes: (a) What people know (or believe) about nature broadly and about specific aspects of nature, and how they acquire and use this knowledge; (b) how knowledge is expressed and shared via language; (c) how knowledge and beliefs interact with affective, social, and motivational influences to yield attitudes and behaviors; and (d) how members of different cultures and speakers of different languages differ in these ways. The papers also point to lessons for advancing sustainability via public policy and public messaging, education, conservation and nature management, and design of the built environment.

Conceptualizing Landscapes Through Language: The Role of Native Language and Expertise in the Representation of Waterbody Related Terms.

Landscapes are essential to human life: they provide a multitude of material (food, water, pollination) and nonmaterial (beauty, tranquility, recreation) values. Their importance is enshrined in international conventions and treaties, committing signatories to protecting, monitoring, and managing all landscapes. Yet, relatively little is known about how people conceptualize "landscape" and its constituents. There is emerging evidence that conceptualizations of landscape entities may influence landscape management. This in turn raises the question as to how people speaking different languages, and with differing levels of expertise, may differ in conceptualizing landscape domains as a whole. In this paper, we investigated how people conceptualize landscape-related terms in a specific domain-waterbodies-by comparing German and English-speaking experts and nonexperts. We identified commonly used waterbody terms in sustainability discourses in both languages, and used those terms to collect sensory, motor, and affective ratings from participants. Speakers of all groups appear to conceptualize the domain of waterbody terms in comparable ways. Nevertheless, we uncovered subtle differences across languages for nonexperts. For example, there were differences in which waterbodies were associated with calm happiness in each language. In addition, olfaction seemingly plays a role in English speakers' conceptualization of waterbodies, but not German speakers. Taken together, this suggests the ways in which people relate to landscape although shared in many respects may also be shaped in part by their specific language and culture.

Odor-Color Associations Are Not Mediated by Concurrent Verbalization.

Odor and color are strongly associated. Numerous studies demonstrate consistent odor-color associations, as well as effects of color on odor perception and language. Yet, we know little about how these associations arise. Here, we test whether language is a possible mediator of odor-color associations, specifically whether odor-color associations are mediated by implicit odor naming. In two experiments, we used an interference paradigm to prevent the verbalization of odors during an odor-color matching task. If participants generate color associations subsequent to labeling an odor, interfering with verbalization during the task should affect the ability to make color associations. In Experiment 1, contrary to our hypothesis, verbal interference did not affect odor-color matches. However, since performance accuracy on the verbal interference task was high, it is possible our task did not sufficiently disrupt verbal processing. In Experiment 2, we, therefore, used an active verbal interference task, and still found no difference across interference conditions. Odor naming accuracy, odor familiarity, and odor pleasantness, however, did predict odor-color matches. This suggests that although color associations are related to semantic factors, they are not generated by recruiting odor labels in the moment. Overall, our results do not provide evidence that language plays an online role in odor-color associations, instead, they are consistent with the claim that language may have shaped associations during development.

Lack of Visual Experience Affects Multimodal Language Production: Evidence From Congenitally Blind and Sighted People.

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus the task-specific effects of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences.

Mental simulation across sensory modalities predicts attractiveness of food concepts.

Concepts are grounded in mental simulation of sensory information, but the exact role it plays in everyday cognition is unknown. Here, we investigate its role in an important conceptual domain relevant for everyday behavior-food. We conducted two preregistered studies to test whether multimodal mental simulation is linked to attractiveness of food concepts. In Study 1, using the Lancaster Sensorimotor norms for a variety of concepts, we found unhealthy food concepts are more strongly associated with gustation, olfaction, and interoception than healthy food concepts. Importantly, these associations mediated the relationship between food healthiness and food attractiveness. In Study 2, we collected new sensory ratings with food words only and found unhealthy food concepts were more strongly associated with all perceptual modalities than healthy food concepts. Again, these associations mediated the relationship between healthiness and attractiveness. The mediating role of sensory associations to food attractiveness was also affected by context. Specifically, when participants thought about food in an eating context cued by verbal instruction, mediation by perceptual strength was weaker. Overall, we find multimodal sensory experience underlies people's belief that unhealthy food is more attractive than healthy food. This suggests mental simulation has an important role in goal-directed behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language.

Musical properties, such as auditory pitch, are not expressed in the same way across cultures. In some languages, pitch is expressed in terms of spatial height (high vs. low), whereas others rely on thickness vocabulary (thick = low frequency vs. thin = high frequency). We investigated how children represent pitch in the face of this variable linguistic input by examining the developmental trajectory of linguistic and non-linguistic space-pitch associations in children who acquire Dutch (a height-pitch language) or Turkish (a thickness-pitch language). Five-year-olds, 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and 11-year-olds were tested for their understanding of pitch terminology and their associations of spatial dimensions with auditory pitch when no language was used. Across tasks, thickness-pitch associations were more robust than height-pitch associations. This was true for Turkish children, and also Dutch children not exposed to thickness-pitch vocabulary. Height-pitch associations, on the other hand, were not reliable-not even in Dutch-speaking children until age 11-the age when they demonstrated full comprehension of height-pitch terminology. Moreover, Turkish-speaking children reversed height-pitch associations. Taken together, these findings suggest thickness-pitch associations are acquired in similar ways by children from different cultures, but the acquisition of height-pitch associations is more susceptible to linguistic input. Overall, then, despite cross-cultural stability in some components, there is variation in how children come to represent musical pitch, one of the building blocks of music. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children from diverse cultures differ in their understanding of music vocabulary and in their nonlinguistic associations between spatial dimensions and auditory pitch. Height-pitch mappings are acquired late and require additional scaffolding from language, whereas thickness-pitch mappings are acquired early and are less susceptible to language input. Space-pitch mappings are not static from birth to adulthood, but change over development, suggesting music cognition is shaped by cross-cultural experience.

Maternal attitudes and behaviours differentially shape infant early life experience: A cross cultural study.

Early life environments afford infants a variety of learning opportunities, and caregivers play a fundamental role in shaping infant early life experience. Variation in maternal attitudes and parenting practices is likely to be greater between than within cultures. However, there is limited cross-cultural work characterising how early life environment differs across populations. We examined the early life environment of infants from two cultural contexts where attitudes towards parenting and infant development were expected to differ: in a group of 53 mother-infant dyads in the UK and 44 mother-infant dyads in Uganda. Participants were studied longitudinally from when infants were 3- to 15-months-old. Questionnaire data revealed the Ugandan mothers had more relational attitudes towards parenting than the mothers from the UK, who had more autonomous parenting attitudes. Using questionnaires and observational methods, we examined whether infant development and experience aligned with maternal attitudes. We found the Ugandan infants experienced a more relational upbringing than the UK infants, with Ugandan infants receiving more distributed caregiving, more body contact with their mothers, and more proximity to mothers at night. Ugandan infants also showed earlier physical development compared to UK infants. Contrary to our expectations, however, Ugandan infants were not in closer proximity to their mothers during the day, did not have more people in proximity or more partners for social interaction compared to UK infants. In addition, when we examined attitudes towards specific behaviours, mothers' attitudes rarely predicted infant experience in related contexts. Taken together our findings highlight the importance of measuring behaviour, rather than extrapolating expected behaviour based on attitudes alone. We found infants' early life environment varies cross-culturally in many important ways and future research should investigate the consequences of these differences for later development.

Losing the sense of smell does not disrupt processing of odor words.

Whether language is grounded in action and perception has been a key question in cognitive science, yet little attention has been given to the sense of smell. We directly test whether smell is necessary for comprehension of odor language, by comparing language processing in a group of participants with no sense of smell (anosmics) to a group of control participants. We found no evidence for a difference in online comprehension of odor and taste language between anosmics and controls using a lexical decision task and a semantic similarity judgment task, suggesting olfaction is not critical to the comprehension of odor language. Contrary to predictions, anosmics were better at remembering odor words, and rated odor and taste words as more positively valenced than control participants. This study finds no detriment to odor language after losing the sense of smell, supporting the proposal that odor language is not grounded in odor perception.

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science.

English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself. Here, we review an emerging body of evidence that highlights how the particular characteristics of English and the linguistic habits of English speakers bias the field by both warping research programs (e.g., overemphasizing features and mechanisms present in English over others) and overgeneralizing observations from English speakers' behaviors, brains, and cognition to our entire species. We propose mitigating strategies that could help avoid some of these pitfalls.

Color technology is not necessary for rich and efficient color language.

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically "simple" non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or 4 basic color terms, with unnamed gaps in the color space. While it may indeed be the case that technology stimulates lexical growth of color terms, it is sometimes considered a sine qua non for color salience and lexicalization. We provide novel evidence that this overlooks the role of the natural environment, and people's engagement with the environment, in the evolution of color vocabulary. We introduce the Maniq-nomadic hunter-gatherers with no color technology, but who have a basic color lexicon of 6 or 7 terms, thus of the same order as large languages like Vietnamese and Hausa, and who routinely talk about color. We examine color language in Maniq and compare it to available data in other languages to demonstrate it has remarkably high consensual color term usage, on a par with English, and high coding efficiency. This shows colors can matter even for non-industrialized societies, suggesting technology is not necessary for color language. Instead, factors such as perceptual prominence of color in natural environments, its practical usefulness across communicative contexts, and symbolic importance can all stimulate elaboration of color language.

The cultural landscape of emotionsBetween Us: How Cultures Create Emotions Batja Mesquita Norton, 2022. 304 pp.

Social context plays an important role in shaping how we feel.

Asifa Majid.

Interview with Asifa Majid, who studies language, culture and cognition at the University of Oxford.

Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence Jackie cut the bagel with a knife encodes the categories Agent (i.e., Jackie) and Patient (i.e., the bagel). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as the knife are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled "Instrument") and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto-instrument is a tool: a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category-instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures.

Humans share sensory systems with a common anatomical blueprint, but individual sensory experience nevertheless varies. In olfaction, it is not known to what degree sensory perception, particularly the perception of odor pleasantness, is founded on universal principles,1-5 dictated by culture,6-13 or merely a matter of personal taste.6,8-10,12,14 To address this, we asked 225 individuals from 9 diverse nonwestern cultures-hunter-gatherer to urban dwelling-to rank the monomolecular odorants from most to least pleasant. Contrary to expectations, culture explained only 6% of the variance in pleasantness rankings, whereas individual variability or personal taste explained 54%. Importantly, there was substantial global consistency, with molecular identity explaining 41% of the variance in odor pleasantness rankings. Critically, these universal rankings were predicted by the physicochemical properties of out-of-sample molecules and out-of-sample pleasantness ratings given by a tenth group of western urban participants. Taken together, this shows human olfactory perception is strongly constrained by universal principles.

Embodied Space-pitch Associations are Shaped by Language.

Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers' co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations.

Crossmodal Associations with Olfactory, Auditory, and Tactile Stimuli in Children and Adults.

People associate information with different senses but the mechanism by which this happens is unclear. Such associations are thought to arise from innate structural associations in the brain, statistical associations in the environment, via shared affective content, or through language. A developmental perspective on crossmodal associations can help determine which explanations are more likely for specific associations. Certain associations with pitch (e.g., pitch-height) have been observed early in infancy, but others may only occur late into childhood (e.g., pitch-size). In contrast, tactile-chroma associations have been observed in children, but not adults. One modality that has received little attention developmentally is olfaction. In the present investigation, we explored crossmodal associations from sound, tactile stimuli, and odor to a range of stimuli by testing a broad range of participants. Across the three modalities, we found little evidence for crossmodal associations in young children. This suggests an account based on innate structures is unlikely. Instead, the number and strength of associations increased over the lifespan. This suggests that experience plays a crucial role in crossmodal associations from sound, touch, and smell to other senses.

Environment and culture shape both the colour lexicon and the genetics of colour perception.

Many languages express 'blue' and 'green' under an umbrella term 'grue'. To explain this variation, it has been suggested that changes in eye physiology, due to UV-light incidence, can lead to abnormalities in blue-green color perception which causes the color lexicon to adapt. Here, we apply advanced statistics on a set of 142 populations to model how different factors shape the presence of a specific term for blue. In addition, we examined if the ontogenetic effect of UV-light on color perception generates a negative selection pressure against inherited abnormal red-green perception. We found the presence of a specific term for blue was influenced by UV incidence as well as several additional factors, including cultural complexity. Moreover, there was evidence that UV incidence was negatively related to abnormal red-green color perception. These results demonstrate that variation in languages can only be understood in the context of their cultural, biological, and physical environments.