Around the world, people like (and dislike) the same scents

TO THE SWEDES, there are few odours more delectable than the scent of , a type of . To most non-Swedes there are probably few odours more repulsive—the fish has been described variously as smelling like rancid cat litter, vaguely faecal or even corpse-like. In determining which scents people find pleasant and which they do not, suggests culture must play a sizeable part.New research, however, suggests that might not be the case. Artin Arshamian, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Asifa Majid, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, began with the expectation that culture would play an important role in determining pleasant smells. This was not just because of examples like that of fermented herring. They had noticed from their own previous work that people from different cultures described odours differently. They also knew from past experiments by other researchers that culture was important in determining which sorts of faces people found beautiful. Thus, they expected to see a similar phenomenon with smells.