Smell Of Women’s Tears Makes Men Less Aggressive: Study

Many soap operas and movies show a man becoming quite uncomfortable after seeing a woman cry. It is often shown that they go to extra lengths to stop her from crying. While it looks like a cliche, have you ever wondered whether there is any scientific connection between men’s behaviour when a woman cries? A recent research study found that women’s tears contain scent-borne chemicals that can lower aggression in men. Research published in the Journal of PLOS Biology showed that women’s tears contain scent-borne chemicals that block aggression in men. As per the study, it was found that upon smelling those tears, research showed reduced brain activity related to aggression in men; which automatically results in lesser aggressive behaviour.

An experiment was done on lab rats which showed that male aggression could be blocked using the scent of female tears. This kind of scent-based communication is termed social chemo signalling. While this study was done on rats, a similar experiment was carried out on two men, who were made to play a game that was designed to make them aggressive. In the experiment, one of the men was led to believe that the other man was cheating and was provided with the chance to seek revenge by causing the “cheater” to lose money. During this, the men were randomly exposed to women’s emotional tears or placebo saline water. The two men were completely unaware of what they were smelling since both were odourless. It was observed that the revenge-seeking aggressive behaviour was reduced by more than 40 percent when the men smelled women’s tears instead of saline.

Shani Agron, a member of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Brain Sciences in Rehovot, Israel wrote in the research that just like in mice, human tears contain a chemical signal that “blocks conspecific male aggression”. He also wrote that the result goes against the notion that “emotional tears are uniquely human.”

The experiment was repeated in an MRI brain scanner and found that the two aggression-related regions — the prefrontal cortex and anterior insula, in the brain, became active when the men provoked each other and wanted to seek their revenge by making the other lose money. But when they were introduced to the women’s tears, these areas of the brain did not become much active. The more the difference in the brain activity, the less often the player wanted to seek revenge during the experimental game.