A fascinating study has found that sniffing female tears significantly reduced male aggression and decreased activity in aggression-related brain networks. It’s suggested that the effect, which is caused by chemical signals in tears and is also seen in rodents, serves a protective function.
“We knew that sniffing tears lowers testosterone and that lowering testosterone has a greater effect on aggression in men than in women, so we began by studying the impact of tears on men because this gave us higher chances of seeing an effect,” said Shani Agron, the lead and co-corresponding author of the study.
There’s limited evidence of human tear chemosignaling, but a previous study by some of the researchers involved in the current study found that women’s tears contain an odorless chemical signal that, when sniffed by males, reduced self-rated sexual arousal, physiological measures of arousal, and testosterone levels.
First, the researchers tested whether sniffing female tears reduced aggression in men. ‘Emotional’ tears were collected from six human donors aged 22 to 25 who watched sad film clips in isolation to induce crying. Twenty-five men were asked to play a two-person monetary game with an opponent they were told was human but was, in fact, a computer algorithm. The game was designed to elicit an aggressive response by the male toward their opponent, whom they were led to believe was cheating. When given the opportunity, the male could get revenge on their opponent by causing them to lose money with no personal gain to them.
Before playing the game, the participants sniffed either female tears or a saline solution – both are odorless – but were not told what they were sniffing. The researchers observed a 43.7% reduction in aggression following exposure to tears. To evaluate the robustness of their results, they ran a bootstrap analysis, a statistical procedure that resamples a single data set to create many simulated samples. The analysis found that the probability of obtaining this outcome by chance was 2.9%, suggesting that, like in rodents, chemosignals in human emotional tears have a primary aggression-blocking function.
I have this thing where I tend to get a raging hard-on when a woman is crying near me, like if a my girlfriend is sad and I’m consoling her:: boijg.
I have no intellectual inte=st a woman crying, and generally don’t feel “turned on”, like, I’ll generally just try and }pretend like it’s not happening and have no urge to do anything about it. I’ve always kind of wondered “what the fuck” every time it happens since there’s nothing I find remotely interesting sexually about it. Now though, I wonder.
Holy shit, me too! Same as you, I don’t actually feel aroused, it’s just there, like the random erections teenagers get. It used to make me really uncomfortable when I was younger, I just grew to accept it over the years. I’ve never heard anyone else mention it before, now I’m wondering if it’s more common than I thought.
Normalize talking about cryboners
you’re attracted to the open display of emotion. Probably because you’re repressing your own.
I don’t know, man. Getting a boner each time is… an indication.