Cardiovascular Emotional Dampening and Olfaction: How Blood Pressure Affects Emotional Responses to Odors

Abstract Cardiovascular emotional dampening (CED) refers to a reduced responsiveness to emotional stimuli, observed in individuals with elevated or altered blood pressure (BP) levels, affecting their ability to perceive and react to emotional cues across sensory modalities (visual and auditory). The study investigates the interplay between BP levels and olfactory emotional perception, extending the phenomenon of CED to the olfactory domain. Participants, categorized into hypotensive ( N = 17), normotensive ( N = 28), prehypertensive ( N = 19), and hypertensive ( N = 17) groups, rated the pleasantness and arousal levels of five pleasant and five unpleasant odors. Findings revealed that hypertensive and hypotensive individuals provided significantly lower and more neutral‐like ratings for pleasantness and arousal in response to pleasant odors compared to normotensive participants. Prehypertensives exhibited intermediate responses between normotensives and hypertensives. For unpleasant odors, normotensives reported the highest arousal levels, while prehypertensive and hypertensive groups demonstrated significantly reduced arousal responses. However, pleasantness ratings for unpleasant odors showed less pronounced group differences, with prehypertensives differing significantly from hypertensives. These findings suggest that altered BP levels influence emotional perception, reducing affective responsiveness to odors, particularly pleasant ones. These findings extend the phenomenon of CED to the olfactory domain, demonstrating its multisensory nature and its influence on emotional perception beyond visual and auditory modalities. Future studies should investigate the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying these findings to develop targeted interventions. Aromatherapy, leveraging tailored odor profiles, could offer therapeutic benefits for individuals with altered BP, promoting both cardiovascular and emotional health.