Smell of women’s tears can reduce aggressive behavior in men: study

By Isobel Williams via SWNS

Sniffing women’s tears can reduce aggressive behavior in men, according to new research.

The study shows that tears from women contain chemicals that block aggression in men and that smelling these tears leads to reduced brain activity related to aggression.

Male aggression in rodents has long been known to be blocked when they smell female tears, which is an example of social chemosignalling, a process that is common in animals but less common in humans.

To determine whether tears have the same effect in people, the researchers exposed a group of men to either women’s emotional tears or saline while they played a two-person game.

The game was designed to elicit aggressive behavior against the other player, whom the men were led to believe was cheating.

When given the opportunity, the men could get revenge on the other player by causing them to lose money.

The men did not know what they were sniffing and could not distinguish between the tears or the saline, which were both odorless.

The results, published in PLOS Biology, showed that revenge-seeking aggressive behavior during the game dropped more than 40 percent after the men sniffed women’s tears.

An MRI of their brains revealed that, when sniffing the tears, men’s two aggression-related brain regions—the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula—were not as active.

Individually, the greater the difference in this brain activity, the less often the player took revenge during the game.

Lead author Shani Agron, a Ph.D. student from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, said: “We found that just like in mice, human tears contain a chemical signal that blocks conspecific male aggression.

“This goes against the notion that emotional tears are uniquely human.

“Finding this link between tears, brain activity, and aggressive behavior implies that social chemosignalling is a factor in human aggression, not simply an animal curiosity.”