The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. Co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The researchers see implications for workplaces, retail stores and other organizations that have relied on traditional surveillance and security measures to enforce rules.

“Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. “This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior.”

Perhaps the findings could be applied at home, too, Liljenquist said with a smile. “Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too.”

The study titled “The Smell of Virtue” was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness.

As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.

• The average amount of cash given back by the people in the “normal” room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33.

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior.

Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause.

• Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).
• 22 percent of Windex-ed room participants said they’d like to donate money, compared to only 6 percent of those in a normal room.

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn’t affect the outcomes.

“Basically, our study shows that morality and cleanliness can go hand-in-hand,” said Galinsky of the Kellogg School. “Researchers have known for years that scents play an active role in reviving positive or negative experiences. Now, our research can offer more insight into the links between people’s charitable actions and their surroundings.”

While this study examined the influence of the physical environment on morality, Zhong and Liljenquist previously published work that demonstrated an intimate link between morality and physical cleanliness. Their 2006 paper in Science reported that transgressions activated a desire to be physically cleansed.

Liljenquist is now researching how perceptions of cleanliness shape our impressions of people and organizations. “The data tell a compelling story about how much we rely upon cleanliness cues to make a wide range of judgments about others,” she said.

World-class athletes crave routine. Baseball’s Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game. Swimmer Michael Phelps blasts hip-hop in his earbuds before races. Others have a lucky shirt or pair of socks that feel right on their bodies, and nearly all of them watch video of previous events to help visualize a peak performance.

Few bother with smell.

Michelle Roark, the 2009 U.S. freestyle skiing champion, wants to change that. Ms. Roark, who is two classes short of a chemical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines, is convinced that the scent from a patent-pending perfume blend that she developed and calls “Confidence” is as important to her success as a good night’s sleep. Before competing, she douses her neck-warmer in the natural fragrance and spritzes it on the back of her neck and behind her ears.

“It’s scientifically proven that smell is closest to our emotions and our memories,” Ms. Roark said during an interview this week from Switzerland, where she is training for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. “Why shouldn’t we use it?”

Like most Olympic athletes, Ms. Roark—who is, at 35, a senior citizen by skiing standards— can’t support herself solely through sports. So when she’s not on the slopes, she can usually be found in a Denver lab mixing essential oils for her fledgling fragrance line, Phi-nomenal.

Leaning on her academic background in petroleum engineering—”I’m refining different kinds of oils now,” she jokes— Ms. Roark now sells six natural scents, all of them blends of essential oils and named for the singular emotional reactions they will inspire—Confidence, Focus, Balance, Adventure, Imagination and what she calls Real, which grounds users in the moment. With skiing taking up so much of her time, her business is only in its early stages, with most of her customers local acquaintances in the Denver area.

One of her biggest expenses is natural rose oil, which requires some 60,000 roses petals to make a single ounce and sells for as much as $5,000 per liter.

Ms. Roark mixes all of the potions herself at her lab in Denver. She bases the ratios of the oils in her blends on the “Golden Ratio,” also known as the phi, or the number 1.618. Approximations of this proportion appear both in nature, such as in the length of the stems of plants and DNA strands, and as the basis for some of the most treasured works of art and architecture, from the Parthenon to Salvador Dali’s “The Sacrament of the Last Supper.”

Scientific studies have shown that smell and emotion exist in the same network of neural structures known as the limbic system—an ancient core of the brain that dates to the beginning of human evolution. People might experience the connection when the smell of baking cornbread returns them to a Thanksgiving morning decades ago.

Ms. Roark’s research is designed to take this connection to a practical level by creating a concoction that will be as universal in its ability to improve performance as aspirin is in relieving headaches. Her scent, “Confidence” is a mix of rose oil from Bulgaria, bergamot from Italy, and grapefruit from Florida. She insists that these scents help her succeed and that they can be used to create the same emotional effects in others. (Aromatherapists say grapefruit oil can be used to generate lightheartedness, rose oil is often used to treat grief or loss and rid people of negative feelings and bergamot oil can improve mental focus.)

“It’s not just mumbo-jumbo,” said Ms. Roark, who has a salon/spa and perfumery set to open in December. “There is a science behind it.”

Some scientists are skeptical. The scents themselves, they say, are only as powerful as our associations with them. Grapefruit oil may energize one person’s nose, but will produce a starkly different reaction from someone who spent his childhood getting beat up by a bully who ate grapefruit for breakfast each morning. “The scent is an artifact of the expectation,” said Bert Hayslip, a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas. “An athlete believes it’s important to success, so therefore it is important.”

Jim Fannin, a motivational guru who has worked with athletes including Alex Rodriguez, said he does not believe there is a universal scent that inspires confidence. Rather, athletes perform best when they relax and focus on the task at hand. Mr. Fannin said one former client, a baseball player, would settle himself down in the batter’s box by imagining the smell of oatmeal with brown sugar, which he found comforting.

“Smell will correlate with an experience on a subconscious level,” Mr. Fannin said. “Peppermint puts me at ease, but it’s personal.”

Ms. Roark, who grew up in Denver, has spent a lifetime turning lemons into lemonade. A top competitive figure skater as a child, she had to give up the sport at 15 because her family could no longer afford the lessons. She switched to skiing, which required little more than a youth season pass to the nearby Winter Park ski area. A year later she made the U.S. team, and in her 20s she once held down three jobs and slept in a tent to help support her skiing career.

Ms. Roark says the idea that she could harness the power of smell to conjure confidence and bring about victory in sports first came to her in 2005 while working with the sports psychologist Karen Cogan, who counsels several members of the U.S. freestyle ski team.

Freestyle skiing encompasses aerial acrobatics and lightning-fast runs down steep terrain covered with boulder-sized bumps, known as moguls, demanding an intense level of confidence and commitment to the task. To hesitate even slightly during 360-degree twists and flips on skis is to invite catastrophe. To build confidence, Ms. Cogan encouraged Ms. Roark to use all five of her senses, including a scent she favored, to enter the kind of flow state where she could sense the onset of a perfect run down a 750-foot slope of moguls.

Ms. Roark finished 18th in the Winter Games in Torino after bobbling the landing on a jump during her first run. She was wearing Confidence at the time and had won two World Cup events heading into the Games, but she lost control of her jump in mid-air. It was, after all, only her first season of using the fragrance and she was still adjusting to its effects, which have completely changed her approach to competition.

“I had no idea what it smelled like to ski well,” she said.

CHARLOTTE, N.C., October 7, 2009

With more than 640,000 square feet and eight floors of shopping, ION Orchard houses more than 300 shops, including international fashion favorites, new-to-market brands, unique store concepts, creative food and beverage offerings and first-of-its kind mall features. ION Orchard delivers a holistic, multisensory lifestyle experience with a distinctive mix of style, design and art.

To help create that experience, ION Orchard turned to ScentAir and its Singapore distribution partner, AllSense. Together the companies designed the scent concept and created several signature scents for ION Orchard.

“Our vision for ION Orchard was to create an experience – an icon fitting of its unmatched location at the gateway to one of Asia’s most vibrant shopping strips,” said Ms. Soon Su Lin, Chief Executive of Orchard Turn Developments. “True to the multisensory experience promised to guests, the mall will offer customized ION Orchard Signature scents ensuring a complete and engaging experience to any visitor.”

In addition to the ION Orchard Signature scents, fragrances such as White Tea and Thyme, Tropical Spice, Fresh Apple, Sandalwood Fire and Baby Powder are used subtly throughout the mall through ScentAir’s HVAC, in-ceiling and portable ScentWave systems.

“ION Orchard is leading the way in redefining the retail experience,” said David Amaral, Vice President of International Business for ScentAir. “We are excited to be a part of this breakthrough retail concept in such a vibrant international market.”

ScentAir offers global service capabilities in 56 countries through its 23 distribution partnerships. For more information, please visit www.scentair.com.

About ScentAir
ScentAir Technologies, Inc. (www.scentair.com) is the leading global provider of scent marketing solutions. ScentAir’s patented delivery systems and high-quality fragrances help enhance environments, communicate brands and create memorable experiences for clients around the world. ScentAir offers a full spectrum of scent delivery solutions from large-scale dispersion systems to self-contained fixtures for distributing scent in commercial environments. ScentAir’s technical deployments are also found in engineered systems for military training and aviation simulation. ScentAir is a privately held company located in Charlotte, N.C.

About ION Orchard

ION Orchard (www.ionorchard.com) is the retail component of the retail-cum-super-luxury-residential Orchard Turn development, jointly owned and managed by Singapore’s CapitaLand Limited and Hong Kong’s Sun Hung Kai Properties Limited.

About AllSense

With offices in Sydney, Australia and Singapore, AllSense (www.allsense.com.sg) is a pioneer in the creation, deployment and measurement of experiential media for brands and retailers.  AllSense partners with ScentAir Technologies Inc, a global presence in aroma marketing solutions and scent delivery systems.

ScentAir Technologies, Inc., the leading global provider of scent delivery solutions for businesses, has announced the appointment of Jeffrey DiRaffaele as Vice President of Strategic Accounts, effective September 1, 2009.

In this new position, DiRaffaele will lead the development and management of strategic accounts for ScentAir’s commercial scent delivery solutions.

DiRaffaele brings more than 17 years of experience with national sales and new business development, including specific expertise in the retail and fine fragrance industries.

“We are very pleased to add Jeffrey to the ScentAir team,” said Tom Conroy, CEO of ScentAir. “Jeffrey’s combination of business development and relevant industry experience will be a great asset to the company as we aggressively pursue new market opportunities and further build awareness of the ScentAir brand.”

Most recently, DiRaffaele served as Vice President of Sales for Premier Retail Networks, provider of digital media solutions for retail. DiRaffaele gained extensive experience in the retail and the fragrance industries through key sales and business development positions with Arcade Marketing and The Royal Promotion Group.

DiRaffaele will be based in New York City and will report directly to Tom Conroy, CEO of ScentAir.

For more information contact Murray Dameron, Director of Marketing at ScentAir, at 704.504.2320.

ScentAir Technologies, along with its distribution partner in Israel, WhiteScent Ltd., have installed the world’s largest scented billboard in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In a marketing campaign for Unilever’s Shampoo Pinuk, ScentAir installed a custom fragrance delivery system to deliver the Shampoo Pinuk fragrance along the sidewalk beside the 394 foot long billboard. The billboard is located next to Ezriali Mall in the heart of Tel Aviv.

The billboard is the largest outdoor fragrance project in the world with systems capable of covering over 110,000 square feet. The project will be installed until the end of August.

Origin: www.playthings.com

PAWTUCKET, R.I.—Hasbro is prepping a line of scent-enhanced puzzles under license from The Yankee Candle Co.

The assortment will feature puzzles that release “subtle, pleasant scents” of proprietary Yankee Candle fragrances such as MacIntosh Apple, Clean Cotton and MidSummer’s Night while being assembled, Hasbro says.

The 300 piece Yankee Candle puzzles will be available at mass retailers and at www.yankeecandle.com this fall for a suggested retail price of $9.99. Also included inside each puzzle will be a $10 coupon for use on any Yankee Candle Company purchase. Hasbro will release a trio of new designs “every two to three months,” according to the company.

“Enjoying Yankee Candles has been a favorite American tradition for generations, and there is nothing more all-American than puzzling as a family,” said Rick Ruffolo, Senior Vice President of Brand, Marketing and Innovation at the Yankee Candle Company. “Adding some of our most popular Yankee Candle scents to the puzzling experience is a great way to enhance the atmosphere when you’re putting together a puzzle.”