If a crying woman’s red nose is not a big enough turnoff to a man, a surprising experiment found another reason: Tears of sadness may temporarily lower a man’s testosterone level.
Those tears send a chemical signal as the man gets close enough to sniff them — even though there’s no discernible odor, researchers from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science said.
It is the first such signal to be found in tears and it is probably not unique to women’s. Theirs just were the first to be studied.
“It’s hard to get men to volunteer to cry” in a lab, said Weizmann neurobiologist Noam Sobel, senior author of the study that was to appear in yesterday’s edition of the journal Science.
Emotional tears are chemically different from the reflex tears that form when you get dust in your eye. However, biologists have long puzzled over the true function of emotional tears: Are they merely cathartic or do they have some other physiological role?
Mice can produce a sort of tear that contains a pheromone — an odorless molecule that triggers basic instincts in many animals. So Sobel’s team tested whether human tears similarly can convey subliminal chemical signals through the nose. After all, we tend to hug a crying loved one, putting our nose near their tears.
First, some women volunteered to watch a sad movie in the lab and collect their tears in a vial. For a comparison, researchers trickled saline down the women’s cheeks and collected those droplets, too.
Healthy young men couldn’t smell a difference between the real tears and the sham ones.
Then came a series of tests: The men were given women’s photographs to rate. When they sniffed actual tears, they found the women less sexually attractive than when they sniffed saline. And to researchers’ surprise, sniffing actual tears didn’t make the men empathetic.
Also, saliva tests of testosterone levels found a dip in that hormone after the men sniffed tears, but not the salt water. Finally, when the men sniffed tears and then watched a sad movie inside a brain-scanning MRI machine, the they showed less activity in neural networks associated with sexual arousal.
“We have never looked at tears in this way before,” said Esen Akpek of Johns Hopkins University’s Wilmer Eye Institute, who wasn’t involved with the new study. “This is really interesting.”
The findings make sense, she said, because the glands that secrete tears bear receptors, or docking ports, for sex hormones — a connection most clearly seen with dry eye, which is most common in postmenopausal women.
Why would our tears have evolved a “chemosignal” to function as a sign of sexual disinterest? It’s possible that’s a proxy for lowering aggression, said Sobel, who now is trying to identify the molecule doing the work.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese