{"id":395134,"date":"2023-12-22T08:12:27","date_gmt":"2023-12-22T13:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/platohealth.ai\/scent-of-a-womans-tears-could-lower-anger-levels-in-men-drugs-com-mednews\/"},"modified":"2023-12-23T22:53:16","modified_gmt":"2023-12-24T03:53:16","slug":"scent-of-a-womans-tears-could-lower-anger-levels-in-men-drugs-com-mednews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/platohealth.ai\/scent-of-a-womans-tears-could-lower-anger-levels-in-men-drugs-com-mednews\/","title":{"rendered":"Scent of a Woman’s Tears Could Lower Anger Levels in Men – Drugs.com MedNews","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm<\/a>. Last updated on Dec 22, 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter<\/p>\n

FRIDAY, Dec. 22, 2023 — A man becoming incredibly uncomfortable when a woman starts crying \u2013 to the point he\u2019ll do anything to make her stop \u2013 is a reliable old chestnut in TV and movies.<\/p>\n

But there appears to be a biochemical truth to that clich\u00e9, a new study reports.<\/p>\n

Women\u2019s tears contain scent-borne chemicals that block aggression in men, according to research published in the journal PLOS Biology<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Smelling those tears leads to reduced brain activity related to aggression, which results in less aggressive behavior, researchers said.<\/p>\n

Prior research has shown that male aggression in lab rats can be blocked by the scent of female tears. This sort of scent-based communication is called \u201csocial chemosignaling.\u201d<\/p>\n

To see if the same is true in humans, researchers designed an experiment in which two men would play a game designed to elicit aggressive behavior.<\/p>\n

One player was led to believe that the other was cheating, and were given the opportunity to get revenge by causing them to lose money, researchers said.<\/p>\n

During these scenarios, the men were randomly exposed to either a woman\u2019s emotional tears or a placebo dose of saline solution. The men didn\u2019t know what they were sniffing, since both tears and saline are odorless.<\/p>\n

Revenge-seeking aggressive behavior dropped more than 40% when the men sniffed female tears, compared to saline.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that just like in mice, human tears contain a chemical signal that blocks conspecific male aggression,\u201d wrote the researchers led by Shani Agron<\/a>, a member of the Weizmann Institute of Science\u2019s Department of Brain Sciences in Rehovot, Israel. \u201cThis goes against the notion that emotional tears are uniquely human.\u201d<\/p>\n

Researchers repeated the experiment in an MRI brain scanner, and found that two aggression-related brain regions became more active when the men were provoked during the game.<\/p>\n

But those same regions \u2013 the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula \u2013 did not become as active if the men were sniffing women\u2019s tears.<\/p>\n

The greater the difference in this brain activity, the less often the player took revenge during the game, researchers found.<\/p>\n

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Sources<\/h2>\n