In a study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior, researchers examined the effect of female tears on male brain activity. The study involved 24 men who were asked to sniff tears from an emotional response machine — which emitted a scent of sadness — as they approached a female researcher.
The women were all seated at either side of a computer screen facing the men. The scientists were looking at two sets of data: one set that depicted how often each man’s brain activity changed from neutral to positive when he was sniffing emotion-inducing tears, and the other set that depicted how often his brain activity changed from neutral to negative when he was sniffing emotion-inducing tears.
The researchers found that people’s brains change states in response to varying levels of sadness, but that it takes just a few seconds before their brains resume their normal patterns after sniffing away those tears.
What makes female tears attractive to men?
Why do guys melt when a girl cries? The short answer is: we don’t know. It turns out women can make men’s brains melt too. A new study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science found that men who sniffed women’s tears were more sexually aroused than those who didn’t sniff.
In the study, researchers recruited men and women and asked them to take part in a sting operation for the U.S. Defense Department. The men were told to tell undercover agents that they were interested in becoming an intelligence officer for the U.S. Army, and the women recruited were asked to lie about their own sexual practices — which included sniffing other people’s tears — in order to earn extra money for their families while they were undercover, according to a news release from NPR .
The researchers used fMRI brain scans before and after an emotional task consisting of playing a game that required participants to choose one of several options (a man with a mustache or a woman with an inflatable boob) as opposed to simply choosing “no preference.” They also recorded participants’ brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures electrical activity in the brain, among other ways, during emotional tasks such as crying or laughing at funny or disturbing things, according to NPR .
The results showed that both male and female subjects reacted differently when they smelled female tears versus male tears after undergoing their emotional trials: The male subjects smelled female tears but not male tears; while the female subjects smelled both male and female tears but not female tears after going through their emotional trials, according to NPR .
One of the interesting findings was that there was no effect of gender on either gender-specific reaction (men smelling male versus female tear), but there was an effect of facial type on both genders: Men who looked more masculine (i.e., bearded) sniffed both types of tear better than those with features more feminine (i.e., short hair). This suggests that human males are capable of identifying different types of emotions by looking at different facial features , according to NPR .
The science behind why men are turned on by female tears
Scientists have known for a long time that men are attracted to women who cry. But researchers also have an idea why this is, and it’s not because women are smarter than men.
It’s because the smell of female tears triggers the same chemical changes in men that make other forms of sexuality appear to be more powerful than others, says a new study.
It’s not clear what attracts us to others’ tears and whether it’s in our nature to desire or respond to other people’s distress, but the authors of this study are convinced this is at least part of the reason why: “We found that, indeed, women seem to be very sensitive and easily triggered by crying,” said lead author Maria G. Chaparro-Gonzalez, an associate professor of psychology at Duke University. “But we also found that high levels of testosterone had negative effects on sexual arousal” (and decreased sexual arousal).
In their experiment with 20 healthy men and 20 control participants, Chaparro-Gonzalez and her colleagues measured how much testosterone was released by each participant after being exposed to either female or male tears. Beforehand, half the men were asked to rate their own level of sexual arousal on a seven-point scale from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much), whereas half were told not to rate their arousal level at all. The other half were told they would be exposed only to male or female tears for about 3 minutes before returning them for testing purposes afterward.
The women who cried did indeed have higher levels of testosterone compared with those who didn’t; however, it wasn’t because they were more attractive — as many prior studies have suggested — but rather because they cried more intensely than the non-crying subjects. For example, subjects who cried exhibited significantly less genitalia withdrawal compared with subjects who didn’t cry (a condition known as “tears aversion”).
In addition, when it came time for the men in the study (at mirroring this information on how they felt toward crying women), they reported being aroused significantly less when they smelled other people’s tears compared with when they smelled male tears’ aromas. This result was true regardless of whether we could identify which gender produced a particular scent: “Men respond sexually differently depending on which gender is producing a particular smell,” Chaparro-Gonzalez said. “The scent alone doesn’t confer any sexual attractiveness.”
Chaparro-Gonzalez
The implications of the study
Group hug: happens when a bunch of strangers, including you, come together to comfort someone who is feeling sad or hurt. How people feel about a person in distress can also affect how they react to it. In the latest installment of our series on women and empathy, NPR’s Shankar Vedantam reports on an experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.
The researchers asked a group of men to smell tears and then asked them to rate how likely they were to cry in response. They found that participants who smelled women’s tears turned off their empathy.
The study wasn’t just a one-off; the researchers repeated their experiment with 200 other men and again found that those who smelled female tears were less empathetic than men who didn’t smell tears at all.
Conclusion
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, was conducted by a team from the University of Liverpool in England and is part of an ongoing effort to better understand why humans are attracted to certain smells.
The researchers found that a woman’s tears were highly attractive to men, regardless of their sex. The scientists also found that men’s testosterone levels dropped when they smelled tears and that these drops were most noticeable if a man had not previously engaged in sexual activity with a woman.
