Scientists have confirmed what we women suspected all along – that tears are a turn-off to men.
It appears that tears do more than show we are sad, they transmit subtle airborne chemical messages that have biological effects. New research has uncovered evidence that when women cry it makes them less sexually attractive to men.
Interestingly, it may not be for the psychological reasons we’d naturally attribute it to. The study, led by Noam Sobel from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, says the effect is the result of pheromones, or scent messages, transmitted by the tears.
Scientist are now investigating whether tears shed by men may send out similar, or different, chemical signals.
While emotional crying is believed to be a uniquely human behaviour, some animals also produce tears – for example studies have shown that male mouse tears act as an aphrodisiac for females.
The Weizmann Institute in Rehovot instigated the study to uncover whether human emotional tears carried similar signals.
The experiment involved male volunteers sniffed either tears from women who watched a sad movie, or drops of salty water trickled down the cheeks of the same women.
In both cases, the men reported that the tears had no odour, but those who sniffed the genuine tears tended to find women in photographs less attractive than those exposed to fake tears.
Tests showed that tear-sniffing men experienced drops in physical arousal and levels of salivary testosterone, the male sex hormone.
The researchers said the finding raised a number of questions, such as the identity of the active compound in tears. ‘The current results conclusively demonstrate a chemosignal in human tears. In this, we illustrate a novel functional role for crying,’ they concluded.
So the studies would suggest that turning on the waterworks with your partner may not have quite the desired effect!
