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Researchers who study olfaction-the sense of smell-define valence as a person's perception of how pleasant an odor is. Conventional wisdom holds that valence is culturally mediated. A team of scientists led by Artin Arshamian evaluated this view by testing how people from ten different places-including the Mah Meri people from a small community in the Malay Peninsula and the Seri people from a small community in Mexico-ranked ten odors from most pleasant to least pleasant. In general, respondents ranked scents similarly regardless of where they lived, overwhelmingly choosing the odorant linalool as more pleasant than diethyl disulfide. These results show that _____