Everyone knows that drinking alcohol can alter the brain, but can smelling it have a similar effect?
A new study suggests that just the smell of alcohol can lower people's resistance. The researchers at Edge Hill University in England recruited 40 participants to examine how alcohol affects behavior. All of the participants had completed the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) to ensure that none of the participants had early signs of a drinking problem, which could skew the research. The researchers gave half of the participants an alcohol-laced face mask. The other half received a citrus smelling face mask that did not contain alcohol.
The participants were then instructed to either press a button when they saw the letter K out of all 26 letters in the alphabet or a beer bottle out of 25 other images of water bottles. The researchers tracked how many false alarms the participants had. False alarms indicated that the participant was not able to resist pushing the button even though the image on the screen was not the one that they were supposed to push for.
"We know that alcohol behaviors are shaped by our environment, including who we're with and the settings in which we drink," Rebecca Monk, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university, said. "This research is a first attempt to explore other triggers, such as smell, that may interfere with people's ability to refrain from a particular behavior."
Monk and her colleagues found that participants wearing the alcohol-laced mask ended up with a higher tally of false alarms, which led the researchers to conclude that the scent of alcohol made it more difficult for them to stop their urges.
"During the experiment it seemed that just the smell of alcohol was making it harder for participants to control their behavior to stop pressing a button," Monk explained.
Even though the study did not prove a cause and effect relationship, the researchers believe the findings could provide insight as to why people might find it difficult to resist alcohol.
"This research is an early laboratory-based effort that, whilst promising, needs to be replicated in real world settings to further its validity," said fellow researcher Derek Heim, who is also a psychology professor at Edge Hill University. "Our hope is that by increasing our understanding of how context shapes substance-use behaviors, we will be able to make interventions more sensitive to the different situations in which people consume substances."
The study was published in the journal Psychopharmacology.
