Women’s tears reduce male aggression: research

2023-12-22 08:00:38

“From a tear on my face I understood many things,” sang Bobby Solo. Exactly 60 years after the release of the song, science seems to prove him right: a female tear can make a difference, in the sense that it can have a ‘calming’ effect on him. Chemistry question. This is what new research published in the journal ‘Plos Biology’ finds, according to which women’s tears contain chemical substances that block aggression in men. Smelling them would therefore reduce this type of behavior. The study was conducted by researcher Shani Agron at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

The smell of tears, from what has emerged, would lead to reduced brain activity related to aggression. It is known, experts explain, that male aggression in rodents is blocked when they smell this odor. It is an example of social ‘chemosignals’, a process common in animals but less common, or less understood, in humans. To determine whether the same effect exists in people, researchers exposed a group of men to women’s emotional tears or to a saline solution during a two-person game. The game was designed to elicit aggressive behavior towards the other player. Men were led to believe that their opponent was cheating, and when given the opportunity they could take revenge on the other player by making him lose money. During the experiment the men did not know what they were smelling and could not distinguish between the tears and the saline solution, both of which were odorless.

What they found was that aggressive and revenge-seeking behavior during gaming decreased by more than 40% after men smelled women’s emotional tears. Functional imaging then showed two brain regions linked to aggression – the prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula – that became more active when the men were provoked during play, but not as active in the same situations in which they were smelling the tears. On an individual level, the greater the difference in this brain activity, the less often the player retaliated during the game. Finding this link between tears, brain activity and aggressive behavior implies that chemosignals are a factor in human aggression as well. “Just as in mice, human tears contain a chemical signal that blocks male aggression. This – the authors conclude – goes against the idea that emotional tears are uniquely human.”