Gender differences in the perception of pungency.

Males and females judged the intensity of the typical pungent stimulus CO2, presented by nose and by mouth, employing two scaling procedures: magnitude estimation and magnitude matching. The two groups differed in their perception of CO2 pungency only when it was judged in the nose. Perceived nasal pungency grew as a power function of CO2 concentration, with an exponent of 2.2 for females and 1.6 for males, and the magnitude matching test showed that, relative to their perception of sucrose sweetness, females perceived pungency more intense throughout the range studied. Perceived buccal pungency grew for both groups as the 1.1 power of CO2 concentration, and the magnitude matching test, employing again sweetness as the reference modality, revealed no intensity differences in the perception of buccal pungency between the genders. It is suggested that the susceptibility of the nasal environment to hormonal and neural influences may account for the differences in perceived pungency between males and females.