Believe it or not, not only do a woman’s tears have a scent, but sniffing them can cause a man to be less aggressive. So it is not beauty that soothes a savage breast – it is crying, according to a new Weizmann Institute of Science study which showed that human tears have much more in common with those of other animals than previously thought.
There was an episode on the original Star Trek where Captain Kirk fell in love with an alien woman after he touched her tears. Apparently, her species’ females had some sort of “love potion” chemical in their tears. So, Start Trek was on the right track with that episode.
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And leave it up to Israeli scientists to be the ones to figure this out.
According to the scientists, a woman’s tears contain chemicals that reduce aggression in others, as do the tears of, for example, mice and blind mole rats. Their study, published in PLOS Biology, showed that sniffing women’s tears lowered brain activity related to aggression in men, thereby reducing aggressive behavior.
The study addressed the long-standing mystery of why we cry.
Prof. Noam Sobel, whose lab in Weizmann’s Brain Sciences Department studies olfaction, the sense of smell, has hypothesized that human tears also contain chemicals that serve as social signals. Back in 2011, in research published in Science, his team had shown that sniffing women’s emotional tears reduced testosterone levels in men, resulting in somewhat diminished levels of sexual arousal.
In the new study, researchers led by PhD student Shani Agron from Sobel’s lab wanted to determine whether tears have the same aggression-blocking effect in people as they do in rodents. In a series of experiments, men were exposed to either women’s emotional tears or saline, without knowing what they were sniffing and without being able to distinguish between the two since both are odorless. Next, they played a two-person game. The game was designed to elicit aggressive behavior in one player toward the other player, who the men were led to believe was cheating. When given the opportunity, the men could get revenge on the other players by causing them to lose money, though they themselves gained nothing.
“We’ve shown that tears activate olfactory receptors and that they alter aggression-related brain circuits, significantly reducing aggressive behavior,” Sobel said. “These findings suggest that tears are a chemical blanket offering protection against aggression – and that this effect is common to rodents and humans, and perhaps to other mammals as well.”
As for social interactions among humans, future research will explore whether the new study’s findings apply to women.
“When we looked for volunteers who could donate tears, we found mostly women, because for them it’s much more socially acceptable to cry,” Agron said. “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. Now, however, we must extend this research to include women, to obtain a fuller picture of this impact.”
