There's increasing consensus that drinking coffee is mostly good for you. In addition to the physical boost it delivers, coffee also appears to lessen our risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, dementia and Alzheimer's disease. It has been demonstrated, in studies, to improve both problem-solving and decision-making. And coffee may even help us live longer, according to a just-released British study involving nearly 500,000 adults in the U.K.
Now, hot off the press, there's more good news: even just the scent of coffee may actually help you perform better, according to new Stevens of Institute Technology-led research.
Stevens School of Business professor Adriana Madzharov, working with colleagues at Temple University and Baruch College, published the finding in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in April.
"It's not just that the coffee-like scent helped people in our study perform better on analytical tasks, which was already interesting," she notes. "But they also thought they would do better, and we demonstrated that this expectation was at least partly responsible for their improved performance. In short, smelling a coffee-like scent, which has no caffeine in it, still has a placebo effect similar to drinking coffee."
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Image: Professor Adriana Madzharov. CREDIT: Stevens Institute of Technology