Need to Turn Off His Sex Drive? Cry

What happens to men when women cry? A new study finds that, as in mice, human tears may serve a “chemosignaling function.” Specifically, female tears seem to reduce male sexual arousal. “We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors, induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces,” conclude the authors (Shani Gelstein, Yaara Yeshurun, Liron Rozenkrantz, Sagit Shushan, Idan Frumin, Yehudah Roth and Noam Sobel). “Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced activity in brain-substrates of sexual arousal in men.” (HT: BP Research Digest) [%comments]