Tears and sexual arousal
Predictably Irrational
By Dan Ariely
January 8, 2011
A fascinating new study just came out, showing that tears that were produced by women under negative emotions reduce the sex drive of men! This gives a men yet another reason not to upset women.
Here is the abstract:
Emotional tearing is a poorly understood behavior that is considered uniquely human. In mice, tears serve as a chemosignal. We therefore hypothesized that human tears may similarly serve a chemosignaling function. 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. 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.
(c) Predictably Irrational

