Women tears: A lethal combination for men

Women’s tears are a turnoff for men, finds a new study.

When a woman cries, chemicals in her tears send off signals, which reduce sexual arousal in males – their libido goes down, scientists from the Weizmann Institute, Israel, revealed in the journal Science Express.

The findings suggest that a chemical in women’s tears lowers men’s testosterone levels.

Looking beyond any impact on sexual drive, the researchers hope their findings might one day be used in cancer treatment. "There are a number of illnesses that are treated by lowering the levels of testosterone, the most prominent is prostate cancer," said Prof Noam Sobel from the institute. He said the current methods of testosterone reduction cause side effects, which may be eliminate by tears use.

Men who took part in the study were asked to sniff the tears of women who had cried while watching sad films.

Sobel said researchers had expected the tears would boost the men’s sense of empathy. Instead, their heart and respiratory rates, salivary testosterone and a brain scan all pointed to a reduction of sexual arousal.

Signal transmits

"Communication is key to survival. Humans, like all mammals, use smell in their communication. It is very efficient if you have a chemical signal which transmits what you want — or clearly don’t want — in a sexual situation," Sobel added.

He said the researchers had set out to study the tears of both men and women, but only one man had responded to a notice put up on Israeli college campuses asking for volunteers who thought they could cry easily.

In the study, women watched sad films alone and captured their own tears with a vial that they held under their eye. Later, 24 men sniffed jars containing either the women’s tears or saline that had been trickled down the women’s cheeks, and then they wore a pad dipped in one of the fluids under their nostrils. Men who sniffed tears judged pictures of women’s faces to be less sexually attractive than did men who sniffed saline, but their feelings of empathy were unchanged.

In a separate experiment, 50 men sniffed either tears or saline. Sniffing tears, but not saline, reduced their self-reported sexual arousal, levels of testosterone in their saliva and physiological measures of arousal.

The researchers also exposed 16 men to tears or saline and measured their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Men who sniffed tears rather than saline showed lower activation in brain regions implicated in sexual arousal, such as the hypothalamus.

Onions

Because the authors of the latest study did not compare the effects of emotional and non-emotional tears, they could not directly assess how the crying women’s feelings influenced the signal. To explore whether tears evoked by different emotions serve unique functions and have a distinct chemical makeup, the researchers should also perform experiments in which they elicit happy weeping, or neutral tears caused by allergens or irritants such as onions. —BBC