Intriguing new research published in PLOS Biology has uncovered a remarkable effect of women’s tears on men’s behavior.
The study, led by Shani Agron at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, reveals that sniffing tears from women can significantly reduce aggression in men.
This phenomenon, known as social chemosignaling, is well-documented in animals but has been less explored in humans.
The study aimed to investigate whether human tears have a similar effect on aggression as observed in animals, particularly in rodents, where male aggression is known to be blocked by the smell of female tears.
The research involved exposing men to either emotional tears from women or a saline solution, which acted as a control.
The participants, unaware of what they were sniffing, played a two-person game designed to provoke aggressive behavior, such as seeking revenge on a player believed to be cheating.
Remarkably, the study found a more than 40% drop in revenge-seeking aggressive behavior among the men who sniffed women’s emotional tears.
This decrease in aggression was further confirmed by functional MRI imaging, which showed reduced activity in two aggression-related brain regions—the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula—when the men sniffed the tears.
This change in brain activity was directly linked to the reduced likelihood of the men seeking revenge in the game.
This research provides compelling evidence that social chemosignaling plays a significant role in human behavior, challenging the previous notion that emotional tears are a uniquely human trait without a functional role.
The discovery that human tears contain a chemical signal capable of modulating aggression opens new avenues for understanding the complex ways in which humans communicate and interact socially, beyond verbal and non-verbal cues.
If you care about mental health, please read studies about Middle-aged women with no kids may have this mental issue and the findings of scientists find a cause of mental illnesses induced by childhood abuse.
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The research findings can be found in PLoS Biology.
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