A prepublication version of a Science paper was just released that is all over the Internet, for good reason because the research reported is really interesting. A group of Israeli researchers headed by Shani Gelstein investigated the biochemical effects on others of exposure to tears. Bottom line: Female tears reduced sexual arousal of males, assessed in various ways.
To paraphrase their summary of the research:
Merely sniffing negative-emotion-related odorless tears obtained from women donors reduced the sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women's faces. 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 showed that sniffing women's tears selectively reduced activity in brain-substrates of sexual arousal in men.
In other words, "unhappy" tears were gathered from women watching sad movies and placed on absorbent pads, which men were asked to smell. Control participants sniffed a saline solution on the pads. As we all know, when we stop and reflect, tears have no discernible odor, but there were still effects of exposure to them - a reduction in sexual arousal. Many of the Internet reports of this research headline it by saying that "tears turn men off," which is strictly true if our focus is on sexual arousal.
But is this the whole story? Tears may turn men off sexually, but do tears turn men off in other ways? I suspect not, at least based on my own experience. Tears make me take someone's unhappiness seriously. Tears make me want to help. Tears make me want to be comforting, to offer a shoulder or a hand. And if sexual arousal is not getting in the way of that, all the better. Indeed, testosterone is linked not only to sexual arousal but also to aggression, which means that exposure to tears may make men kinder and gentler.
That such effects may have a biochemical basis is intriguing beyond belief.
The researchers concluded that tears must contain a chemical signal (I agree), although it remains unidentified. Further research is needed. And it will be conducted because the mark of interesting research is that it stimulates more research.
