Women's tears dampen a guy's ardour

A woman's tears contain chemical signals that significantly tend to decrease sexual arousal and testosterone levels in men.

The existence of pheromones in humans has been debated, although research has shown that human sweat communicates information about individual identity, genetic relatedness, emotional states and health status. Mouse tears contain sex-specific pheromones, but scientists have not previously demonstrated that human crying is a form of chemical signalling until now. "A very recent research project from the US provides really exciting evidence for another source of human chemo-signals in tears. In this particular study, women watched sad films alone and captured their own tears with a vial that they held under their eye. Later, 24 men sniffed jars containing either the women's tears or saline that had been trickled down the women's cheeks, and then they wore a pad dipped in one of the fluids under their nostrils. Men who sniffed tears judged pictures of women's faces to be less sexually attractive than did men who sniffed saline, but their feelings of empathy were unchanged. In a separate experiment, 50 men sniffed either tears or saline. Sniffing tears reduced their sexual arousal. The researchers also exposed 16 men to tears or saline and measured their brain activity. Men who sniffed tears rather than saline showed lower activation in brain regions implicated in sexual arousal.