It turns out that smelling women's tears reduces men's aggression, researchers say that even when people become adults, they cry 'because it's useful'
When a woman sheds tears, most men become confused or panicked, so it is sometimes said that ``
A chemical signal in human female tears lowers aggression in males | PLOS Biology
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002442
Women's Tears Chemical Diminish Male Aggression - Neuroscience News
https://neurosciencenews.com/womens-tears-male-aggression-23591/
Sniffing Women's Tears Makes Men Less Aggressive | Scientific American
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sniffing-womens-tears-makes-men-less-aggressive/
Animals communicate by emitting various chemical substances from their bodies, and humans use these as social signals mainly through sweat, and animals mainly through urine and excrement.
Previous studies using rodents have shown that female tears suppress male aggression, but the question remains whether the effects of these chemicals, known as ``chemosignals'', also apply to humans. was unknown.
Therefore, a research team led by Hiroaki Matsunami of Duke University Medical Center in the United States conducted an experiment to measure how aggressiveness changes by having men smell women's tears or saline. Ta.
First, the research team gathered six tear-prone female donors between the ages of 22 and 25 to serve as collaborators, and asked them to collect the tears that trickled down their cheeks into a vial while watching a sad movie. As a result, each female donor obtained an average of 1.6 ml of ``tears shed when feeling sad''. The research team also collected ``saline dripping from the woman's cheeks'' in a similar manner by dripping saline onto the woman's face before collecting the tears. The collected samples were then flash frozen in liquid nitrogen.
The research team thoroughly investigated the effects of women's tears, including asking female donors to take hormonal contraceptives to eliminate the effect of ovulation on body odor and refraining from wearing makeup from the evening before. This prevents scents from mixing.
The researchers then recruited 25 healthy men, with an average age of 26.2 years, and placed them in an odorless chamber coated with stainless steel. After exposing them to either the woman's tears or saline, which had been collected using the method described above, they were asked to rate the strength, pleasantness, and familiarity of the odor. They also had a sample-soaked pad placed under their noses before playing a competitive game.
The male participants were led to believe that they were playing an online competitive game, but in reality it was a one-player game where the algorithm was their opponent. The goal of the game was to earn as much money as possible, and we were informed that at the end of the game, we would receive the money we actually earned during the game. The game also included elements in which players could steal their money from their opponents and steal it back, which was intentionally designed to provoke aggression.
As a result of this experiment, it was found that men who smelled a woman's emotional tears were approximately 44% less likely to act aggressively in revenge. Furthermore, in a second experiment in which men were asked to play a similar game while their brains were scanned using MRI, they found that when men were provoked by an opponent during play, two brain regions associated with aggression, namely the insular cortex , The brain and prefrontal cortex were activated, but it was confirmed that they were not activated as much when smelling women's tears.
'As in mice, we found that human tears contain chemical signals that block aggression in male conspecifics,' the researchers wrote in the paper. This goes against the idea that it is unique.'
Lead author of the paper, Shani Agron of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said, ``The fact that humans continue to cry not only as babies but also as adults suggests that the shedding of tears ``continues throughout life.'' I think this shows that it is a useful action.'
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