Study shows crying isn't attractive

From IDS Reports

It’s time to wipe away the tears to win a man.

 A new study proposed that the scent of a woman’s tears carries a chemical message that decreases sexual arousal in men.

Cognitive neuroscientist Noam Sobel conducted a study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Researchers collected women’s tears in a tube after they watched a sad movie scene and then asked men to sniff vials of tears and vials of saline. 

Although men reported no difference in the smell of the actual tears and the saline, they rated pictures of women’s faces differently depending on what they smelled.
The amount of testosterone found in the men’s saliva stayed the same when men smelled the saline solution, but dropped by 13 percent after they smelled the actual tears.

According to National Geographic news reporter Christine Dell’Amore, a study using magnetic resonance imaging of the men’s brains also found that there was less brain activity linked to sexual excitation after men smelled real tear chemicals.

These findings suggested that although tears are often linked to feelings of empathy, the women’s tears created a chemosignal that had a substantial effect in reducing a man’s arousal.

Researchers are unsure which chemicals in tears are responsible for decreasing a man’s arousal.

“Women may influence men by chemosignals in addition to and not in place of spoken language, facial expressions or body language,” said Sagit Shushan, co-author of the study at the Weisman Institute.

Sobel suggested in the study published in Science that tears send messages that reduce aggression. Sobel’s team plans to study tears of all humans and the effects of the chemical communication before coming to any conclusions.

— Eshley Spitzer