10/01/2011, 04:58 AM
Quote:In an Israeli laboratory, Shani Gelstein is harvesting a woman’s tears. The volunteer is watching the end of the boxing film The Champ. As she weeps, she holds a vial under her eyes to capture the fresh drops. This might seem ghoulish, but Gelstein has used the collected tears to understand why people cry during emotional times. She thinks they’re a chemical signal.
Gelstein used several different techniques to show that the smell of a woman’s emotional tears could reduce a man’s sexual arousal. The men never actually saw anyone cry, and they didn’t know about what they were smelling. Even so, their sniffs reduced their testosterone levels and they lowered the activity in parts of their brain involved in sexual desire.
“Smells are an effective non-verbal means of communication,” says Noam Sobel, who led the study. “It is intuitively obvious to us that smell signals can be used to attract (sexually and otherwise). It is just as helpful to have smells that will do the opposite.” Sobel and Gelstein don’t think that this effect is unique to the tears of women, but for reasons that will become obvious later, they only studied female tears.
Quote:But the drops did provoke a reaction. Gelstein asked 24 men to sniff a jar containing either fresh tears or saline, and to wear a pad on their upper lip soaked in the same chemical. Each volunteer smelled tears on one day and saline on another. Neither they nor Gelstein knew which was which until all the results were in. With the smell of tears wafting into their nostrils, the men found pictures of female faces less sexually attractive, although no more or less sad. Saline didn’t affect them either way.- Source: [Discover Magazine]
In a second experiment, Gelstein asked 50 men to sniff tears or saline before watching a sad film. In this explicitly sad context, the tears didn’t influence the volunteers’ mood any more than saline did. But when the men sniffed tears, their skin became better at conducting an electric current (a sign of sweat and psychological arousal) than after sniffing saline. As before, their sexual arousal dipped afterward, according to their answers on a questionnaire. Their saliva even backed up their claims, for it contained less testosterone.
As a final test, Gelstein scanned the volunteers’ brains while they took a whiff of tears. She specifically focused on parts of the brain that are involved in sexual arousal, such as the hypothalamus, which controls several basic bodily functions, and the fusiform gyrus, which helps us to recognise faces. She found that these areas were less active when the men watched a sad film, if they had previously sniffed tears instead of saline.
Tip for rapists: don't make your victim cry, or some with a blocked nose.
hehe