Dior, J'adore: The role of contextual information of luxury on emotional responses to perfumes

Luxury conveys values of quality and rarity and holds a particular emotional meaning. Yet, studies conducted on the impact of contextual information of luxury on emotional responses to products remain scarce. In this study, we tested whether contextual information, in particular evoking luxury, could influence emotional responses to perfumes, which are known to be powerful elicitors of emotion. More specifically, we measured the subjective, physiological, and expressive components of participants' emotional responses. We conducted an experiment in which participants had to smell and assess perfumed pens as well as blank pens (i.e., without perfume) presented either in a luxurious context (i.e., name, brand and bottle), a non-luxurious one, or no information. Results indicated that participants tended to rate perfumes as more pleasant and rated them as more familiar when presented in a luxurious context than in a non-luxurious one or without context, and the blank pen as more irritating in a non-luxurious context than in a luxurious one. However, we did not find evidence of a significant contextual information effect on expressive or physiological indicators. Our findings suggest that contextual information of luxury can moderately influence the subjective component of participants' emotional responses, while no evidence for such effect was found with respect to the physiological and expressive components.