| dc.description.abstract | Essential oils (EO) are volatile odors obtained from
various plants. Their usage dates from ancient India
and Egypt, and they have been used for more than 5
thousand years. The EO can be produced by distillation,
expression, and CO2
high-pressure methods. Today, they
are widely used for esthetic and therapeutic purposes
by inhalation, oral administration, or through the skin.
In the fields of medicine and psychiatry, under the
name of “aromatherapy,” they are used in various fields,
such as in emotion and control of mood, anxiolytics,
antidepressants, alertness, improvement of memory, and
in the treatment of cognitive disorders. Besides these
usages, it is known that aroma is used to increase labor
efficiency and to decrease labor errors.1 In addition to
esthetic and therapeutic usages; their potential usages in
the fields of behavioral attributes and learning has started
to attract attention in recent years. Research in this field
shows that aroma has important effects on attention
level, cognitive performance, creativity, mathematical
success and writing skills, task performance, robust
perception, and memory. Moreover, it is stated
that aroma may have important effects on learning
efficiency, learning speed, and learning permanency by
positively affecting the mood, which have an important
place in directing human behavior. These effects occur
through the connection of the olfactory nerve to the
hypothalamus and limbic system.2
Lemon essential
oil is produced by the cold expression method, and is
a volatile fragrant oil. In traditional medicine, lemon
oil is used for colds and to calm. In addition, recent
studies have shown that lemon oil has anxiolytic,
sedative, anti-spasmodic, and antidepressant effects. A
study performed on humans showed that it improved
creativity and mood and affected heart rhythm.3
The
aim of this study is to investigate the effects of lemon
essential oil as an aromatic stimulus on the learning
behaviors of male rats | en_US |
