The smell of women's tears makes men softer
Women's tears as a remedy for aggressive behavior? At the very least, experiments by a research team suggest this peacemaking connection: aggressive behavior in men decreased significantly when they smelled women's tears.
The smell of women's tears has an effect on men's aggressive behavior. At least that is what a study suggests, the results of which were published in the journal "PLOS Biology". As the international research group led by Shani Agron from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel reports, sniffing emotional tears reduces certain brain activities that are associated with aggression.
For their experiment, the team recruited six women, who they said were built close to the water, and had them watch sad movies. The volunteers, aged between 22 and 25, collected their tears in a tube, with an average of 1.6 milliliters of tear fluid being collected. Beforehand, the researchers allowed a saline solution to run down the women's cheeks, which they also collected and used as a control fluid.
In the next step, the scientists carried out several experiments with 31 men, who were made to smell the saline solution and the women's tears. In one of the experiments, the test subjects played a game that was deliberately designed to provoke them. In the course of the game, the men were given the impression that their teammate was cheating on them. The participants were then able to take revenge on the other player by robbing him of his money in the game, which the research group equated with aggressive behavior.
Vindictive aggro behavior decreased significantly
According to the study, this vengeful, aggressive behavior during the game decreased by more than 40 percent when the men sniffed the women's tears. Repeating the experiment in an MRI scanner revealed that two brain regions associated with aggression - specifically the prefrontal cortex and the insular cortex - became more active when the test subjects were provoked during the game. However, these regions were not as active in the same situations when the men smelled the tears. The greater the difference in this brain activity, the less often the test participants took revenge.
The research team sees a connection between tears, brain activity and aggressive behavior: This suggests that social chemosignaling is a factor in human aggression and not just a phenomenon in animals. In fact, some earlier studies had already shown that tears from mice, for example, contain pheromones that inhibit aggression in males.
Chemical signal
However, the authors do not refer to pheromones in the female tears of the experiment, but write more generally: "We found that human tears, just like in mice, contain a chemical signal that blocks the aggression of male conspecifics. This contradicts the idea that emotional tears are unique to humans."
The study also identifies weaknesses in the work, including the fact that it did not investigate how women react to the smell of tears. This is because the extraction of the stimulus - i.e. the tears - is too complicated and costly. However, in view of the gender differences in the processing of social chemosignals in the brain, the experiments would have to be repeated with women in order to obtain a complete picture.
Presumably "a mammal-wide mechanism"
In addition, the reported results were weaker when the men were in an MRI scanner: "This is perhaps not surprising given the discomfort of our participants on scanner day 2, but it remains a limitation." Nonetheless, the study concludes: "We hypothesize that tears are a mammalian-wide mechanism that provides chemical protection against aggression."
As early as 2011, a study by the same institute in the journal "Science" reported that testosterone levels in men fall when they smell women's tears: Chemical signals contained in them would dampen male desire. However, several attempts by Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets to confirm these findings failed. Vingerhoets - who has been researching the question of why people cry for more than 20 years - reported this in the journal "Cognition and Emotion" in 2017.
If there is a substance in female tears that has a dampening effect on men's sexual arousal, this influence is very weak at best and certainly does not always affect all men in their sexual function, Vingerhoets and his team wrote at the time, concluding: "Crying thus appears to exert its powerful effect on others through its acoustic and visual aspects rather than via a chemosensory pathway."
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Source: www.ntv.de
