Woman's tears of sadness
Woman's tears of sadness lower testosterone in men
- Study shows smell plays role in our reaction to crying
- By Lauren Nearguard on the Associated Press
Washington - if a crying woman's red nose isn't a big enough turnoff to a man, a surprising experiment found another reason; tears of sadness may temporarily lower is testosterone level. Those tears send a chemical signal as the man gets close enough to sniff them -space even though there’s no discernible order, say researchers from Israel's Wiseman Institute of science, publishing in today's edition of the journal Science. It's the first such signal to be found in tears and is probably not unique to women. There’s just were the first to be studied. Emotional tears are chemically different from the reflex here's the form when you get Dustin your eyes. But biologists have long puzzled over the true function of emotional tears: are they merely cathartic or do they have some other physiological role?
Mice can produce a sort of tear that contains a pheromone, and the odorless molecule that triggers basic instincts in many animals. So the team tested whether human tears similarly can convey subliminal chemical signals through the nose, after all, we tend to have a crying loved one, putting our nose near their tears.
First, some women volunteer to watch a sad movie in the lab and collect their tears and a vial. For comparison, researchers trickled sailing down the woman's cheek and collected those droplets, two. The healthy young man couldn't smell the difference between the real tears and the saline solution.
Then, came a series of test: the women were given women's photographs to rate. When they sniffed actual tears, they found the women less sexually attractive than when they sniffed saving. Sniffing actual tears didn't make the man empathetic.
Also, saliva test of testosterone levels found a dip and that hormone after they sniffed tears but not the saltwater. Finally, when they sniffed tears and then watched a sad movie inside a brain-scanning MRI machine, the men showed less activity in neural networks associated with sexual arousal.
“We have never looked at tears in this way before", said Dr. Esen Akpech of John Hopkins University's Wilmer Eye Institute.
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